


A Marriage Plot

by maedron



Series: the years start coming and they don't stop coming [2]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Multi, Other, Trans Male Character, Transgender themes, Transphobia, an attempt to answer that nick offerman joke that's like "was elrond in a gay marriage?", and mutual pining, genderqueerish Elrond, sort of also fake dating, taking advantage of narrative inconsistency in the history of galadriel and celeborn, you can cover all the bases when you date for 1750 YEARS
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:40:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 46,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29085519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maedron/pseuds/maedron
Summary: The history of Elrond and Celebhîr: how they entered into the longest, most politically convenient engagement of the Age, and how they managed to fall in love in spite of it. (A very queer interpretation of a very canon romance.)
Relationships: Celebrían/Elrond Peredhel, Elrond Peredhel/Ereinion Gil-galad
Series: the years start coming and they don't stop coming [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2133981
Comments: 48
Kudos: 73





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **There will be a major content warning throughout this entire work for transphobia, including misgendering and dead-naming.** It will be reiterated in relevant sections. 
> 
> General disclaimer that this is my personal interpretation of how TGNC identity might operate in a Tolkien Elf context, and even then just for the purposes of this story. It is a billion times valid that Elves ascribe to zero gender binary across the board, and I hope to write fic in this vein as well, but this particular fic is an exploration of what it might be like to prevail against the cissexist and heteronormative gender norms Tolkien (conceivably) had in mind when he was writing the LaCE.
> 
> Note as of 3/3/21, that about halfway through writing this, I learned of the Gnomish/proto-Sindarin word _gwegwin_ , literally "man-woman," translated [here](http://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/reference/references/pf/22_words.php) as [an antiquated term for] intersex, but also construable as nonbinary/trans/third-gender. I've ended up incorporating this into the more gender-y parts of Chapter 3, but not knowing what Tolkien meant by the term, I'm sticking to my own homebrew framework for how (binary) trans self-identification might work for the elves in this story. More details on that coming in the very gender-y Chapter 3. 
> 
> THAT ALL BEING SAID (whew), this is the hornier, hopefully better-researched sequel to the previous Elrond-centric fic in this series, "An Education." You definitely don't need to read that story to enjoy this one, although some original characters/plot points will be referenced. 
> 
> Timeline notes: In this and the previous fic I'm using the continuity that Galadriel and Celeborn went into Eriador/to Lake Nenuial immediately at the beginning of the Second Age, rather than staying in Lindon. (I swear this is _among_ the possible continuities laid out in "The History of Galadriel and Celeborn," in spite of Tolkien Gateway and HoGaC itself gaslighting me, although anyone feel free to correct me, I am so, so confused.) Only marginally relevant, but I am also not accepting that Númenor didn't develop a viable maritime culture until ~600 S.A. or whatever, because I want Elros and Elrond to be able to hang out a least once between the end of the First Age and Elros dying, jfc.

_“...and it was then Elrond first saw [...], though he said nothing of it.”_

— _Unfinished Tales_ , “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn"

One day a seducer met a seducer  
now said one what do we do  
fly into each other's arms said  
the other ugh said one

—"I Met a Seducer," Grace Paley 

###

**Ost-in-Edhil, 1295 S.A. The gloaming of the new _yén_ , five minutes to twilight.**

Jeweled collars were all the rage in Eregion this century, Ereinion proclaimed, and so insisted on lending Elrond one from his personal collection. It was a matter of absolute political import that his steward and senior advisor seem stylish before their allies in the East, said the High King, at least as much as said steward was conversant on mithril tariffs and the capital improvement plan for the highways through Eriador. 

And this is why Elrond finds himself loitering and mortified on the margins of a great grotto hewn into the foothills of Ost-in-Edhil, where he is in attendance at a feast marking the new long-year, the ninth of the Second Age of Middle-earth. His neck and décolletage are weighted down by a delicate matrix of silver and lapis-lazuli, disproportionately heavy given how little skin it covers; the piece requires pairing with a specially tailored tunic banded below the clavicle. 

Yet everyone else at this party seems to have gotten a memo about the dress code: wear anything _but_ a collar. If making a fashion statement truly held the geopolitical significance the King sometimes insists it does, Elrond might already have been declared an enemy of the state. 

“Whose great-aunt did you borrow _that_ from?” 

The woman posing this question passes Elrond a shot glass. He accepts it, scanning her face: hair of auburn, skin of bronze; gold rings piercing her septum and freckled brow; gold coating her left canine tooth. Gold binding her hair in a geometric Dwarven style. Ah. Very much like her father’s, when Elrond saw him briefly for tea this afternoon, the first person he called on after napping off the six-week journey out of Lindon. No longer does Celebrimbor blunt his locks at the jawline with a pair of forge-shears; Elrond might have asked him for Gwaith-i-Mírdain fashion tips, had the smith not been so eager to rush back to his workshop. 

“Nathriel.” Elrond raises the glass. “Or is it Nerdawen?” 

He does know it’s Nerdawen, but Elrond is not above trading a slight for a slight. Celebrimbor’s daughter scowls. 

“ _You_ of all people ought to be able to tell twins apart.” 

“Ah. That’s right. Nathriel is of a gentler disposition.” 

“Which of us is deigning to be _seen_ with you while you’re dressed like that?” 

Elrond sips the shot—something very smoky, distinctly Noldorin—grinning in a manner that is not entirely ingenuine. 

“Nerdawen. We do miss your charming presence on the coast.” 

The twins have never entirely respected Elrond, having met him when they were still children and he was the coltish, still-bearded, underqualified chief councilor of the freshly built city of Forlond, at a few scant years their senior already given a shocking amount of responsibility over the dominion of the Noldor in Middle-earth. Most of that responsibility had reduced to terrifying masses of paperwork, and Elrond had aged more quickly than a typical Elf (being of mixed heritage that was, at the time, still very much sorting itself out). None of this has ever soothed Nerdawen and Nathriel’s suspicions of him, which are surely also tied to the aura of his connection to their mysterious great-uncles. 

“And what brings the coastal elite to our humble mountain outpost?” 

Elrond sighs. “Affairs of state, I’m afraid.” 

Nerdawen scoffs. “Good luck with that.”

“I suppose I shall need it.” 

Elrond drinks. His schedule tomorrow features a full slate of appointments with the councilors of the Lady and Lord of Eregion, followed by dinner with Their Eminences. Yet it is plain that Galadriel and Celeborn are not present at this evening’s revelry. Delicately phrased rumor holds that they have rarely mingled with the masses, in recent times. Galadriel’s vision of an Elven city meshed in the ancient heart of Dwarven art and commerce seems to be outgrowing even her formidable prowess; tensions have simmered since the arrival of the strange Western emissary some decades ago began driving unforeseen advances in industry. This is why Elrond hoped for more than a brief tea-time’s meeting with Celebrimbor, nominally a private citizen but considered by many to be the effective leader of Ost-in-Edhil, as founder of the Gwaith. 

He turns again to Nerdawen, somewhat moved, he must admit, that she has not yet abandoned him, but seems content to stand surlily on the party’s fringe. 

“Your father wouldn’t happen to be coming this evening?” Elrond asks. 

Nerdawen downs her own shot before she answers. “If you want a piece of him, you’re going to have to get in line behind everyone else.” She wipes her mouth on a gilded sleeve. “Very little to go around, once his _friend_ has his share.” 

“Friend?” Elrond says. “Friend with…rhetorical emphasis?” 

“Friend as in ‘ancient friendship.’ Yes. Emphasis.” 

Elrond considers the ‘Brimbor he knew in Lindon, his deep and often publicly displayed affection for his wife. If he has turned his robust attentions to another, it is easy to see the display being just as public. And if the other is indeed of the kindred of Melian, the affection must be returned in ardent gestures indeed. 

“And how does your mother feel about this?” 

“Erenwen? She’s into it. They’ve always been very supportive of each other sexually.” 

She laughs at Elrond’s slight blanch. 

“What? We’re all adults, Elrond. You’d know just as much about _your_ parents’ love lives, if you had any around to ask.” 

Elrond is forming some kind of strongly worded objection to this muttered insult, when his attention is diverted. Arrested, perhaps, for the diversion comes in the form of a most arresting person, suddenly come to stand before him: A tall Elf-lord, tan-skinned, silver-haired—half of it sheered to the scalp, the other half cascading like white-hot flame over epaulets gilded with mithril and pale gems. 

For a moment Elrond thinks the discussion of Celebrimbor’s friend has indeed summoned Annatar, Lord of Gifts, in the flesh (so to speak). But he recalls that Annatar’s prevailing color scheme runs to gold; this person is all of silver, even in their eyes, which are the color of green leaves slipping under the running ice-melt of a winter thaw. 

“Hello,” says their interrupter. “Terribly sorry to bother you, but—” 

Somewhere a great bell chimes, and cheers burst through the air; twilight has turned on the new yén. 

At this signal, the silvery Elf-lord shrugs, takes Elrond’s face in their hands, and draws him into a deep kiss. 

Panic should be Elrond’s primary reaction, panic and aversion, as a foreign dignitary already seeming quite undignified. Instead, frisson snakes down his spine, for a moment out of time leaning him into the stranger’s embrace, their hot and insistent mouth, the slide of slender fingers against his ears. 

A warm blush of shame spreads beneath all that embellishment on his chest. 

All of which is to say, Elrond takes far longer than he ought to break away. 

By the time he regains the composure to wrest from the embrace, the stranger has done the same. They break off the kiss, backing away with hands raised wide. 

Elrond holds his hand to his jaw, summoning his best outrage. “What was the meaning of that?” 

“My apologies, but you see,”—they laugh, as silvery as everything else, as Elrond recoils, glance darting to Nerdawen beside him, who seems both unfazed and annoyed—“my friends dared me to.” Elrond feels their cool green gaze travel down his neck. “And to tell you your collar is hideous.” 

“So I’ve been told,” Elrond manages, certain of the high color in his cheeks. 

The stranger smirks with full lips (so very recently entwined with his), giving a little salute.

“Well! Goodnight!” 

And then they dash away, back to a laughing cadre in the thick of the crowd, a bedazzled black-bearded Dwarf—female, by her headdress—and three other Elves. Among them is Nathriel, hair done far less fussily than her twin’s. She gives Elrond a little wave. 

“I apologize for the unfavorable comparison to your sister.” Elrond’s speech is rushed; his breath has been shallow. “Now, would you please tell me who that was?” 

Nerdawen’s eyes roll nearly back into her skull. 

“That,” she sneers, “was Lord _Amroth_. Drawing attention to himself as usual.” 

There is something deeper than disdain in her pronunciation, an irony that is lost on Elrond. 

“Amroth?” he asks, rifling through his mental file on the Sinda nobility. “Do you mean…” 

But Nerdawen has been approached by a pair of argumentative Dwarves, who draw her rapidly into some contentious discourse broken off earlier today in the smithy. Elrond nods along to the incomprehensible barbs about metallurgy and metaphysics, eyes scanning the crowd. Which is beginning to thin, and his accoster is now nowhere to be seen; doubtless there are afterparties from which out-of-towners and the ill-tempered are being excluded. 

Amroth. As the conversation drones on, Elrond summons what he can of his image, the brief and shocking press of their bodies; warm skin, ice-green eyes, slender fingers fitted to his jawline. Mocking, teasing, but kissing him all the same, and kissing deep. 

It is not long before finds he will need to excuse himself. 

Elrond bids his company goodnight, citing his arrival this morning after a long journey, his many and important meetings tomorrow. Fortunately, Nerdawen and her interlocutors have already relegated him to a party decoration, and so he retrieves his greatcoat and walks out into the chill spring evening, first of the long-year and the short. 

The cold is welcome. Altogether too much heat has built in Elrond’s person, and it ebbs as he sets off for forested side of the city. And flows anew; the closer he approaches his lodgings, and privacy, the more he allows his thoughts to trace the memory of the encounter. Amroth. How rude, how random—and yet…

By the time he has flung himself on the eiderdown—they even make bedding better, in Ost-in-Edhil—it is only a few swift strokes before he is spilling into his hand, coaxed by the echo of silvery laughter. 

And still in the King’s collar, no less. Yet Elrond laughs, as he carefully extracts himself to the washroom, not wanting to scandalize the laundresses. He knows Ereinion would appreciate that his finery has been the means to this end.

###

Elrond takes no risks in dressing for the court of Galadriel and Celeborn. His reward is a day-long marathon of meetings with various councilors, and their very respectful attentions. The types who take to government in Ost-in-Edhil are the opposite of those who stick to craftsmanship: polite, helpful, utterly circumspect. From the minister of commerce to the minister of sanitation, they reaffirm the thriving interdependence between the city’s artisan class and its leadership, and their mutual interest in cooperating on matters of import to the Crown.

And then at end of the day, as Elrond is packing up his folios, Lady Galadriel herself walks in unscheduled. All in gray and white, golden hair half-bound, she wears no diadem, no chain of office; she doesn’t need to. 

Elrond bows deeply as she takes a seat at the head of the long table. 

“Did you believe them?” Galadriel asks. 

“I beg your pardon, my Lady?” 

“The bureaucrats. I’m sure they told you some very nice stories.” 

Elrond sits down across from her. For many years he and Galadriel played correspondence chess in their letters between Lindon and Lake Nenuial, and later Eregion. He has had far fewer opportunities to practice speaking to her in person, and so thinks of their interactions less as conversation and more as a series of strategic advances and retreats. 

“Surely they were stories that have some basis in reality. Most do.” 

Galadriel tilts her head. “Is that what they said to you about your parents?” 

Every joke about his ancestry is as tiresome as the last, but Elrond smiles out of political obligation, although the Lady does not. She is the kind of person who reserves laughter for joy; in humor she tends toward the deadpan. 

“What, then, is the reality?” he asks. 

“The Gwaith want me gone,” Galadriel says, resting her chin on her upturned fist. “I plan to leave before I give them the pleasure of revolting against me.” 

Elrond shifts in his seat. “Surely Celebrimbor respects your office. All you have done to build up the place.” 

“Tyelperinquar has ever loved me as a kinswoman, and I him, in spite of his misfortunate to be born a Fëanorian.” Galadriel states this as a fact, not an opinion. “As a co-regent he is beginning to find me inconvenient.” 

“Regent?” Elrond asks. “He doesn’t rule. Does he even wish to?” 

Elrond considers his brief discussion with Celebrimbor the day before. The smith only wanted to talk about the Gwaith’s latest innovations, other discoveries of which they were nearly on the brink; anything that distracted him from the work, including meetings with royal emissaries/cousins/old friends, seemed of far less consequence. ‘Brimbor’s desire has ever been to better the world from his workbench. Leaving the ruling of Ost-in-Edhil to Galadriel and Celeborn—the tedium of administration, of ceremony—has always seemed an elegant arrangement. 

Galadriel traces some invisible pattern on the table with her forefinger. “It’s no matter what Tyelpe wishes,” she says. “Others wish it for him.” 

“Annatar?” 

The Lady fixes her unsettling eyes on Elrond, their glimmer seeming to amplify with subdued rage. 

“I’ve already lived once in a land governed by the whims of a Maia, loving and fearing her in the same heartbeat. I do not think I will again be moved by one of their kind.” 

She does not need to mention that a part of this Maia is present, that dormant and dilute in Elrond’s strange blood is her ethereal lineage. He, too, understands what it is to love and fear Melian, though she has rarely reared herself outside his private life, not since a strange interlude in his youth. 

(A slight exception came nearly a century ago, when the glittering Lord Annatar humbled himself in the High King’s halls in Forlond, beseeching Gil-galad for the opportunity to give him great gifts. Retreating to private council, Elrond needed only utter four simple words for Ereinion to send the strange spirit packing: _She doesn’t like him._ ) 

“Yet the rest of the city he does move,” says Elrond. 

“Tyelpe he moves.” Galadriel’s flat tone betrays the same implication Celebrimbor’s daughter supplied the night before. “And the rest of them are moved by Tyelpe, by innovation and progress. They were long before our guest’s arrival. It is only since Annatar came to Ost-in-Edhil that my distaste for him has been cast as…anti-technological. I was here parleying with the Dwarven mining syndicates before half the Gwaith apprentices were born. Now they say I’ve gone tree-hugger with my Sinda husband.” 

Galadriel sounds nearly amused, saying this, and she springs to her feet. 

“The benefit to looking to the trees, of course, is they tell you how the wind is changing. Come, Peredhel.” 

She leads Elrond out into the hall. The city’s administrative offices do, in fact, look to the trees; they are built around a grove of ancient larches. Galadriel dodges branches snaking in through the un-paned windows, as Elrond with considerably more stop-and-start avoids coniferous impalement. 

“You mean to say you’re leaving?” he says when he is once again in step with her, descending the grand staircase to the lower level. 

“I am seeking new opportunities. Little else is to be said of the matter, for now.” Various Elves in courtly dress, and several Dwarves, bow in succession to the unacknowledging Lady as Elrond follows her across the floor to a second, narrower staircase. “Celeborn has much he wishes to discuss with you.” 

They ascend to a private apartment, with a large window open on the mountains glowing with sundown. 

“Lord Elrond!” calls the broad-backed, silver-haired Sinda from a far armchair, his sleeveless tunic revealing brown, muscled arms latticed with warrior’s tattoos. “You’ve just missed some kind of remarkable starling. Like the white-crowned we used to see in the forests of Neldoreth.” Celeborn squints into tree-line. “Just amazing, what the migration’s bringing in.” 

Pointedly, Galadriel takes a chilled bottle from a well-stocked service table. “I need wine, if you’re going to talk about birds.” 

Elrond accepts a glass. “Is your daughter in town, to join us for dinner?” 

Elrond met Celebrían a few times as child and young adult at Nenuial, yet over a half-dozen visits to Ost-in-Edhil he has yet to encounter her. It seems she spends long sojourns with Celeborn’s family in the East, which is where Celeborn also prefers to be much of the time. (Beneath his gentle disposition is a not-insignificant disdain for the Dwarvishness of his wife’s enterprise, and perplexity at her willing proximity to Fëanorian craftsmanship, even of a disavowed Fëanorian.) It is a rare enough thing as it is to encounter even two-thirds of the family assembled. Having not had a choice about being forcibly separated from every member of his family, this is not an arrangement Elrond particularly understands, but it seems to work for them. 

He thinks the question innocuous enough, a bit of small talk. Yet at the asking a sour line crosses Galadriel’s fair brow, and Celeborn draws his attentions even further into the forest. 

“Our daughter,” the Lady begins, pacing toward her husband, “rarely avails herself to her parents these days. Let alone to visiting dignitaries.” 

She perches on the arm of Celeborn’s chair, tucking an errant strand of hair behind his ear.

Elrond sees he has probed something sensitive. He moves to apologize—for what, he isn’t sure—but then Galadriel’s mouth quirks, and she is inquiring after her ridiculous cousin, who she won’t call _King_ , won’t call _nephew_. And Elrond is playing a game again, of statecraft and shrewd tongues, all the way through dinner and dessert and postprandial backgammon, at which he is beaten three-for-three, and then he is spun out into the night with glimmering eyes still dancing across his field of vision and a vow to count every titmouse in Lindon, and he desires nothing more than to collapse onto his well-furnished bed.

###

**Forlond, 1296 S.A. Eight weeks later.**

In the late afternoon, when the council chambers have been cleared of all save the High King and Erestor, Elrond clears his throat, bringing forth a query that was withheld from his official report. 

“Do we know an Amroth?” 

Ereinion Gil-galad, first of his names, last of his line (for he has no heir but Elrond, who refuses to be one), spins a pencil against the table. 

“You mean the Prince Amroth at Edhellond?” 

“He’s Prince at Lórinand now,” supplies Erestor, whose official title is Royal Architect, though his expertise encompasses practically every other subject. 

The King purses his lips in confusion. “I thought that was a different Amroth.”

Erestor shakes his head, returning to his sketchbook. 

“Well, which of him would be more likely to be in Ost-in-Edhil for the new _yén_?” Elrond continues. “Also, he was called Lord, not Prince.” 

Ereinion scoffs. “Gods, but the Sindar could find some more names for their sons. How many Amroths can there possibly be?” 

“Only one of them who propositioned me,” Elrond says mildly. 

His companions both look up from their distractions, Erestor with anxious concern and Ereinion with amusement. 

“Propositioned?! What in Arda is that supposed to mean?” 

Erestor’s impulse to parent him discomfited Elrond when he was younger, but he’s since gotten used to it; the old Noldo simply can’t help himself. 

The King shakes his head with a feline grin. “Look at you! Off seducing second-rate royalty on routine diplomatic missions.” 

Elrond raises his hands at both of them. “I would not call it a seduction,” he says. “More like a cruel joke. He appeared out of nowhere and kissed me at the final twilight. Then he disappeared just as quickly. It seems his friends goaded him to approach the person in the hideous collar.” 

Now it is Ereinion’s turn to be outraged. 

Erestor ignores him. “This is most upsetting, Elrond. Does Lady Galadriel know she has rogue lords out and about humiliating emissaries?” 

Elrond shrugs. “I neglected to inform her.” 

Erestor’s brow furrows in disapproval. 

“He was very handsome!” 

“Handsome and cruel.” The King considers. “Always a dangerous combination.” 

Beleaguered, Erestor gathers his books. “Someday the two of you are going to learn that diplomacy is a matter of the _mind_ , not the—” 

“Heart?” says Ereinion sweetly. 

Erestor need only glare at them to supply his meaning. “I’m leaving. My liege. My lord.” 

He does not neglect the formal bow. Elrond nods; Ereinion blows a kiss. 

“When are we going to find _him_ someone to proposition?” says the King after a moment, knowing full well that Erestor is not quite out of earshot. “Would be nice to take the edge off. Have a century of reprieve from…that.” 

“You know how it is,” Elrond says, returning to some minutiae of paperwork. 

Erestor was once married—not in the eyes of the law and Gods, but Elrond knows that it was a marriage, nonetheless. His husband perished in the sack of Gondolin; there are graven images of his single-handed combat with the Enemy’s fell servant displayed in these very halls. Erestor has not sought another since, and will not. 

Ereinion is a different story. Elrond waits while the King gets up to close the council chamber doors, keeps his eyes downcast on his ledger and his quill continually moving as slow footfalls approach his seat. 

The King folds himself over Elrond’s shoulders, breath brushing his ear. 

“Tell me more of this Amroth.” 

Elrond’s spine softens slightly into the embrace. “There is nothing more to say. I didn’t seem him again.” 

“A shame. Did you wish to?” 

The King punctuates the question with a small bite to his neck. Elrond twitches in protest. 

“You’re going to make me splatter the ink.” 

“Really, Elrond.” Ereinion slinks around to face him, lifting his chin with two fingers. “What a lazy metaphor.” 

Then he shoves the chair forth from the table and drops to his knees. Flipping the folds of Elrond’s court-robes from his legs, Ereinion begins making short work of his breech-laces. 

Elrond gasps. No matter how many times it happens, he will never not be made breathless watching the High King of the Noldor take his cock into his mouth. Wearing his crown and all his regalia, as if such a thing were a vital affair of state. 

Which it more than often is; sex improves Ereinion’s concentration, calms him and evens him. Elrond learned long ago that letting the King use him in such a manner is of critical importance to the good governance of the kingdom, and by extension the welfare of the Peoples of Middle-earth. 

Of course, Elrond is also using the King, after his own manner. 

He digs his fingers into Ereinion’s hair—knowing from his schedule there will be no more public appearances today—and draws him onto his growing length with pleas hardly fit to address royalty.

###

For many of the years this has been going on between them, Elrond thought he and Ereinion might fall in love. They’ve never managed to.

The love of the _fëa_ , the spirit, lies elsewhere for the King, with a woman he knows from childhood—a woman he hoped might be his queen, but could not be, by the laws the Eldar, for Laswiniel is a woman of her own making, and unable to bear children with a _nér_. Ereinion might have disregarded custom, established a new precedent for a new Age. Yet the weight of the High Kingship, of tradition, had clouded his judgment in this. He marred the relationship, and she left him. It has been a long time since. Laswiniel found a keen-eyed Falathrin sailorwoman, among Círdan’s people, and together they have a home at Mithlond and three grown children. Ereinion dotes on them as his nephews and niece, love that would have been reserved for their mother alone. 

In this arrangement there is unforeseen joy, and no seeming bitterness. Still the King sorrows of Laswiniel, in moments even more private than this. Elrond does not question Ereinion’s need for intimacy, nor his own. 

His own first love left Lindon a long time ago. Alendel, the King’s former Chief of Staff, had no interest in entering into the eternally binding marriage of the Eldar. Among the so-called dark-Elves, more enlightened notions prevail of coupledom, and one might enter into many marriages and bear children with multiple partners. Elrond tried to convince Alendel he was capable of breaking with his people’s convention to make such a life with them. But Alendel told him he was too young to be certain of that, and Elrond felt condescended to, and the argument had ended rather publicly in a tearful scene on the margins of court. That was all centuries ago; today, Elrond assures that favorable trade relations are maintained with the semi-autonomous Avarin settlements in Eryn Galen, where Alendel is now one of the governors. Love he thought would claim him forever has dissipated into long letters, politics and friendship. Elrond is older now. 

And yet still young. 

The key evidence for this, the counterpoint of his life: how he watched his brother grow old, through his letters, through visits to Númenor that still seem too few. Through a kind of clarity that came between them in the last years of Elros’s life, when their minds seemed as close as they had been when they were small boys splashing in the tidal pools at Sirion, needing no spoken language to delight in overturning sparkling pebbles, catching minnows and crabs. Elrond felt his brother pass from the world in this kind of delight, the largeness of his spirit crashing and dissipating into the Outer Sea while his now-frail body rested, and the twin of that body across the Sundering Sea twisted in grief. 

The grief had gone on a long time. Elrond had grieved absence before, but never death; Erestor had been there, knowing something about this, allowing him to feel the bitterness entwined with the love. 

And then, just when Elrond began to walk again among the living, there was the High King, some night after some banquet or other, asking Elrond to call him Ereinion, for godssakes, since no one else would anymore. 

Then there was Ereinion on his mouth, Ereinion taking him and giving himself for the taking. This has become their arrangement, behind the closed doors of the council chambers, on an extravagant rotation of beds in the King’s apartments. 

It was overwhelming, at first, being subject to Ereinion’s lavish attentions, and nothing more so than his quicksilver shifts between King and lover: how he can be undone and panting in Elrond’s lap, and moments later making maddening inquiries into some footnote of policy, stark naked in his silk sheets and yet putting forth demands that will have Elrond’s junior staffers burning candles deep into the night. 

This, more than anything else, has likely prevented the blossoming of romance between Ereinion and Elrond. They need to work together, and work well; they will need to for an Age and more to come, the Great Theme permitting. 

Love might impede that work, whether love sought with each other or with anyone else. Yet sex only seems to make the work more efficient. Even those most scandalized by the strange collaboration of the High King and his reluctant (or refusing) heir have come to accept this. 

It is an entanglement, of roles and sentiments, a slippage of boundaries, but such has been Elrond’s life, from the beginning.

###

Entanglement; it is Ereinion between his legs, Ereinion’s practiced lips stoking the swirling pleasure in his core. He makes a rhythm of retreats and advances, now pulling off to murmur how he’s missed this pretty cock—Elrond laughing, hardening further—now licking the head, flushed and beginning to drip, before engulfing him again, deep into a velvet-hot throat.

Elrond has the King on his knees; in this he is the envy of hundreds dismayed by Gil-galad’s confirmed bachelorhood, wondering why it is their handsome sovereign will have none but whom he trusts most. Elrond should not want anything beyond this, and yet he is thinking of another: one who made his pulse quicken in sudden shame, of plush lips and mocking green eyes, of silver hair cast over him like a pall of lightning. 

Slippage. 

He curses in Quenya—this is not Elrond’s first language, but it is the first in which he learned obscenities—as Ereinion takes his seed, as he always does. When one wears velvet in sufficient quantities, this is a matter of laundering concern as much as a prurient preference. 

The King produces a silk handkerchief from somewhere on his person, wiping his mouth in mock irritation. 

“You do know that was intended to be a prelude. Now you’re going to need a nap before you’re of any use to me.” 

“Then you shouldn’t have moaned about how much you’ve missed sucking cock,” Elrond says breathlessly, snatching away the handkerchief for his own purposes. 

“No,” Ereinion says, rising to his feet; Elrond, as soon as he recovers his own modesty, slips his fingers through the parting of Ereinion’s robes, teasing at the stifled hardness beneath the heavy linen. “I don’t think I’ll be accepting the blame for this. Take it up with your strange Sinda lord, and how he left you wanting.” 

“Ereinion Gil-galad,” Elrond murmurs, as the King sinks toward him. “Do I detect a note of jealousy?” 

Ereinion raises his brow, so far betraying no reaction to being fondled. 

“Jealous of someone called Amroth, and we don’t even know which Amroth? Certainly not.” 

“Hm. Perhaps I can convince you otherwise.” 

“I am amenable”—Ereinion gives the slightest hitch of breath—“to being convinced. But I would prefer to be more comfortable.” 

“Of course.” Elrond draws back his hand. “Lowly councilors can be sucked off at their workbenches, but the King must have his silk sheets, and his pillows just so.” 

Ereinion gives a little bitten-lipped shrug, acknowledging all the luxuries he is entitled to, and Elrond kisses him spitefully, and they never do make it to bed, after all.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of the genesis of this fic was Amroth's consistent narrative inconsistency, as both Galadriel and Celeborn's son and an unaffiliated Sinda prince :p You're welcome, Jirt, for my providing a queer solution to this paradox. 
> 
> About half (??) of this is already written, updates may be slow as I endeavor to figure out what the plot actually wants to be! 
> 
> Also comments are very welcome! I am truly just a feral novice fic writer delurking for the first time in almost twenty years of Tolkien fandom, I have no idea what I am doing. If you would like to watch someone have small nervous breakdowns about Elrond in the tags you are also welcome to follow me on [tumblr](https://i-am-a-lonely-visitor.tumblr.com/).


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for deadnaming/misgendering. 
> 
> Timeline note: Galadriel and the canonical Celebrían probably showed up in Rivendell closer to the founding after the fall of Eregion, when the first (White?) Council was held ca. 1701, but for plot reasons I'm spacing these events out. Also all that happened at the first Council was that Gil-galad gave Elrond Vilya; so maybe sometimes a Council is just two ~~boyfriends~~ coworkers with bad boundaries arguing about jewelry. 
> 
> General note that I am scrambling between Tolkien Gateway and rereading "The History of Galadriel and Celeborn" for the 300th time and still not understanding who is supposed to be where at any given year of the second age ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ so apart from the purposeful canon fuckups already mentioned, there will probably be many more inadvertent canon fuckups.

**Eregion, S.A. 1697**

It has been several centuries, and there are matters of far greater concern at hand. And yet: when he learns that a troop of reinforcements has arrived under the banner of someone called Amroth, Elrond lets out an involuntary laugh. 

“My Lord?” The lieutenant tilts her high helm. “Shall I send him in for council?” 

Elrond regains composure, drawn down again by the weight of the past months—Ost-in-Edhil taken, engulfed in the chaos that has already overrun the rest of Eriador. Celebrimbor’s arrow-shot body displayed like a hunting trophy by his treacherous Annatar, finally revealed as they should have always known him. Sauron, Gorthaur of old, protégé of Morgoth Bauglir himself, _how had they not known?_ How could they have not guessed, with the dread all these years of the shadow in the East, that it was the same dread Galadriel and Elrond both felt at the sight of the emissary? 

Celebrimbor had not been the only one beguiled by a god; perceiving the Maia closely enough he was the only one who saw the full truth, in the end. 

Yet in the doing he enabled the making of a fell weapon, and though he also made weapons to withstand it, before succumbing to his fate, it is all a knot of grief and desperation. All too little, all too late, just as Elrond’s march from Lindon two years ago, with a valiant but insufficient host, even with the support of the Sindar and Nandor under Celeborn not enough to hold Eregion. The land is blighted, the few refugees of the craftspeople’s city live in terror among the ragged troops, and the power of the new Enemy is yet undaunted. 

Reinforcements are badly needed, regardless of any personal baggage Elrond might have with their commanders. 

“Yes,” he nods to the lieutenant, assuming authority as best he can. “Send him at once.” 

Yet the Amroth who bursts into his tent shortly thereafter is not the Amroth Elrond was thinking of. This one is a quick-tempered, short-statured Sinda prince with no flowing silver locks, only immovable battle-braids in pedestrian brown, who launches immediately into a stratagem for holding off the rearguard of the Enemy’s forces with the aid of Khazad-dûm. He has already parleyed with Durin’s generals. His confidence in this scheme might have struck Elrond as arrogant folly, at some earlier point. Yet after months of defeat and despair he finds himself near to embracing Prince Amroth, by the time he has laid out his proposal. 

And so Elrond accepts the aid, and his own task: to seek North, and there shelter the survivors of Ost-in-Edhil. 

###

**A refugee camp in an unnamed valley, the fork of the River Bruinen, S.A. 1701**

The war follows. No sooner had the scouts lead their caravan to the sheltered valley in the foothills of the Hithaeglir that the Orcs began their onslaughts, sometimes in small, vicious bands, sometimes in terrifying hordes, never relenting. There is no rest for their defenses, a tense alliance between young troops trained in Gil-galad’s service and hoary Fëanorian knights who survived to work among the Gwaith, their long-dormant battle-lust easily rekindled. 

Elrond is certain that among their number are those who slaughtered at Sirion, at every kinslaying before. And yet they burn with fealty for Maglor’s foster-son. 

There is little time to dwell on the irony. The years blink by in tumult. For a long time the field hospital is the only permanent structure in the valley, and it is here that Elrond occupies himself, presiding over healers who tend to the steady stream of wounded from the Orc raids. In his personal care are the long-term disabled from the siege of the city, strange cases to match his strange, intuitive, semi-autodidactic healing abilities, a gift of Melian now put to practice. Cruel weapons were used in the breaking of Ost-in-Edhil, things not only of steel and fire but torments that languish in the spirit longer than wounds of the flesh. Elrond prefers not to guess at their design, though someday he will have to; for now, his tends to the damage done. 

This alone seems impossible, half the time, a puzzle of endless guesswork in the phrasing of cantrips in ancient or half-dead tongues, a maddening trial-and-error of herbal applications. There is a shortage of athelas; there is a shortage of almost everything. 

For a year and more Gil-galad has barely held the Lhûn from the assault of Mordor. Elrond wakes morning after morning in dread of the messengers arriving with cries that Lindon has fallen. And yet, beyond all hope: when news comes from the West, it is of the arrival of the Númenórean hosts, coming to aid after long delay under an Admiral Ciryatur. 

The news gets better: that Sauron has been routed—though after all that has been lost, in these brief and violent years, there are no celebrations. Not even when the High King himself arrives in the valley, personally thrusting his spear into the neck of the last standing Orc at the makeshift gates. 

Once they are behind closed doors—flaps, technically, Elrond has reacclimated to working out of a tent—he is more than half expecting Ereinion to kiss him, after five years and separation and strife. Instead the King sinks onto the nearest chair, his handsome jaw tense and shadowed in the lamplight. 

“I need you to stay,” Ereinion says. 

Elrond nods deferentially, remembers duty and position, banishes thoughts of corded muscle concealed by mithril mail. 

“That I intend to, while the worst wounded gain the strength to travel to the Havens. As long as it takes.” 

It may take years. Among the survivors are Celebrimbor’s wife and daughters: Erenwen, Nathriel, and Nerdawen, secreted from the city before the worst of the siege but haunted and paralyzed by the memory of the past centuries. Their wounds are of a kind Elrond does not know how to heal. 

“You will stay longer than that.” Ereinion looks up, his slate-blue gaze unwavering. “I am making you vice-regent in Eriador.” 

Regent, a word too close to _reign_. To the heirship Elrond has never wanted. 

“A permanent appointment,” the King continues, calm but terse. “Eregion will not be remade. Someone must hold the Eastern front.” 

Elrond’s life is in Lindon: his work, his library, Erestor, _Ereinion._ He can’t even begin to put this to words; it is all simply too obvious. 

“Don’t stammer, Elrond. I brought you all your books.”

“My liege…my King…” 

“Speak freely.” 

“Ereinion, this valley is already on the map for every Orcish patrol east of the mountains. Even if the Enemy is forestalled, we cannot sustain ourselves living in constant defense. It would do better to rebuild at Eregion, which is already possessed of _walls_ …” 

“And yet was breached from within.” 

Elrond bites back a sigh of frustration, and finds the feeling transformed in his throat: grief. 

“Do you not have need of me in Lindon?” 

Ereinion holds his gaze. “Lindon does not see far enough; that has been our bitter lesson. I need my sharpest eyes, my keenest mind, to watch the East.” 

“Flattery will not do you well, if you intend to abandon me to some…rural outpost, with half the population wounded and all of them traumatized, and no established supply-lines—why are you _smiling_?” Elrond demands, watching the laugh lines crease at Ereinion’s temples. 

“The same reason I always smile: to keep from weeping for the fate of Arda Marred.” Ereinion leans back, crossing his hands in his lap. “And because you know I’m right. You’re just being difficult.” 

Elrond finds Ereinion’s obstinance strangely affecting, after the time they have been parted, even has he begins to launch into a litany of further objections. 

But Ereinion only silences him, saying: “Hold out your hand.” 

Reflexively, Elrond obeys his King’s command. When he looks down Ereinion is kneeling before him in his armor. He takes something from a chain around his neck; an impossible glint, like sunlight on water, catches from the dying lantern. 

And then he is putting a ring on the fourth finger of Elrond’s left hand. 

It would seem rather like a betrothal, if not for the placement. 

“‘Brimbor’s last gift,” Ereinion says, patting his hand as Elrond recoils, regarding the sumptuous gold, the deep-blue stone, the core of it churning somehow with cold fire. 

(A long time ago, Elrond recalls Celebrimbor saying he never worked with jewels, not unless he had to.) 

“I cannot—” _accept_ is the word on his tongue, but _stop staring_ is nearer to the truth. Elrond thrusts his arm down, drawing the sleeve over the hand. “Surely Vilya was intended for you alone to bear.” 

“Shall we continue to cleave to ‘Brimbor’s good intentions, after his demise?” Ereinion drawls.

The memory of Sauron’s banner of flesh is too near for Elrond to conscience such sarcasm. He holds firm, as Ereinion stands, and takes his hands, brushing his thumb over the ring. 

“It was given to me to wield wisely. The greatest part of my wisdom lies with you.” Rare tenderness limns the King’s words, usually held at bay by humor or authority, or both at once. “Lindon I can hold of my own accord; it is just about the only thing I do well. I need eyes and ears turned on the East. And so I am asking you to build this place, and protect it. With Vilya you will do both.” 

“Will?” says Elrond. 

Ereinion presses their foreheads together. 

“Will,” he says, and it’s then he finally kisses him: an affirmation, and a command.

###

**Imladris, S.A. 1753**

In addition to dragging Elrond’s entire library and the rest of his worldly possessions in the war-caravan from Lindon, the King brought him an architect. Erestor was delivered to the valley ruffled, making many remarks about having not survived the Helcaraxë and Gondolin to die in a ditch on the East Road with an orc-arrow through his neck. Yet the journey had given him considerable time to contemplate the topographical surveys provided by the royal scouts, and he arrived with a vision. 

Elrond has spent the better part of the next fifty years allowing him to execute that vision, signing off on timber choices and tiling patterns, mostly watching in mute astonishment as Erestor builds a house for him. “House” is perhaps an insufficient word; so is “city.” Imladris is a complex, a symbiote with the surrounding valley, weaving in it its crags and rills and coppices. For the first several decades Elrond is astonished to take a turn on a particular staircase and find a waterfall descending artfully beside the banister, as if it had been installed for that very purpose and not worn through the rock above over a thousand ages of the earth. 

Lindon was built rapidly, in the energy and desperation of the early Age, the new-formed continent. Imladris, though smaller in scope, takes more time, though time has changed for Elrond, the longer his life goes on. With Vilya, it is changed again. The ring seems to whisper a strange temptation: that he might stop time entirely, let the valley linger in summer while in the outer world the light fades to winter. 

Elrond lets the seasons pass. The small part of him that is Melian, who once cast glamours over her own domain, seems suspicious of the artificial power. He uses the ring to protect the valley and its people, not embalm them. 

Perhaps knowing he would wield it this way was the wisdom of Ereinion’s gift, which Elrond still doubts on occasion—though the doubt is more than any of these rings should be wielded in the world, untouched by the Enemy though they may be. 

(For now, Elrond only guesses at the identities of the other bearers, but he prays they feel the same wariness.) 

Yet it is undeniable that between Erestor’s design sense and Vilya’s guardianship, Imladris becomes a very pleasant place to pass the time. Elrond is not always certain he can take responsibility, but his people are filled with love and gratitude for their Lord. And their host; from the beginning, Elrond’s house seems to attract a steady stream of visitors. 

Celeborn is among the first of these, arriving with some of his troops from Lórinand to swell the valley’s ranks. He stays for a quarter-yén, installing himself on a cliff-side where he studiously observes generations of raptors. 

Elrond is certain he is about to get an update on the mating rituals of kestrels when the Sinda prince steps in stride with him one morning. 

“My lady wife bids me tell you that her party has reached the Ford of Bruinen,” Celeborn says mildly. “Have you accommodations?” 

Elrond is confused on several levels, before remembering that Galadriel and her husband are practiced in _ósanwë_ , and often converse at a distance. This leaves the greater confusion. 

“I do not recall hearing that Lady Galadriel was coming to Imladris.” Had the seneschal neglected to tell him? Worse: _had_ Celeborn told Elrond this, and _he_ subsequently neglected to inform the seneschal? 

Yet Celeborn shrugs. “This is the first I’m hearing of it, myself.” 

With minor frenzy, Elrond sees to it that accommodations are prepared. These anxieties, however, pale before what comes as he witnesses the party’s arrival at his gates. 

Beside the Lady Galadriel on her dapple-gray palfrey is a tall, tanned Elf-lord with cascading silver hair. 

From his balcony, Elrond sees green eyes glint in the afternoon sunlight, somehow seeking him out in his half-hidden vantage behind a pillar. They are eyes he remembers well, which were laughing the last time he saw them; which now scintillate with disdain. 

Before Elrond knows where his feet are carrying him, he has run to the hospital wing. 

In the surgical theater, a group of students stands around a table. The various internal organs of Andabon, a below-averagely intelligent horse recently felled by a tree-root, glisten on trays. 

Elrond coughs from the threshold. 

“My lady Nerdawen,” he calls. “Might I…” 

Celebrimbor’s daughter, who is presiding over the lesson, holds up a scalpel and glares. 

(The attraction of staying in Imladris was twofold for Nerdawen. Firstly, the superior medical facilities, suitable for a surgeon of Fëanorian precision; she'd fallen into the profession after spending centuries perfecting increasingly fine-bladed knives in the forges of Ost-in-Edhil. The second part of the appeal seems to be the unending opportunity to express contempt for Elrond. If any of this balms the trauma of her father’s downfall, Elrond accepts it is part of his services as a healer.) 

“Please,” he mouths. “It’s _urgent._ ” 

Nerdawen does not put down the knife, but stalks toward him, the students all craning their necks. Elrond conceals himself on the other side of the door. 

“Lady Galadriel has arrived at Imladris. In her company is the Lord Amroth.” 

“And…?” 

“The Amroth who disgraced me at the new yén in Ost-in-Edhil. You were there, you never told me who he was, no one else seems to know, and…” 

Some realization crosses Nerdawen’s face, and she begins to laugh. 

“What?!” 

“Oh, no, no, no.” The scalpel-point waggles with uncomfortable proximity to Elrond’s chin. “I am not getting involved.” 

“Nerdawen, I need the slightest bit of context,” he hisses. “For political reasons.” 

“I think you’d better figure this one out on your own.” Nerdawen grins evilly. “ _I_ have a class to teach.” 

And with a bow, she slams the door.

###

He tries on three different sets of robes and no fewer that twenty-six earrings, in various permutations, before settling on relatively subdued damask in grey and indigo paired with silver cuffs and sapphire studs. (He has begun to amass a small collection, to match Vilya, although his new signature piece is invisible to all but the wearer.) Ereinion keeps sending him exquisite diadems, but Elrond has yet to feel comfortable wearing a crown.

There will be a private reception with Galadriel beforehand (and Celeborn, though he has been long received). Yet Elrond’s anxieties are fixated on the welcome feast that will follow for the entire retinue, and the inevitability of reencountering Lord Amroth. 

How someone who publicly humiliated him five centuries ago, who arrived on the doorstep of his gracious home with naught but a sneer, has inspired the birdlike thrumming of his pulse, the dithering over braid-symmetry—there is no rationale that Elrond can rightly articulate to himself.

His body only remembers the fierce blush that overcame him that night, and his mind seems at war over the wisdom of doing everything to avoid a recapitulation versus doing anything— _anything_ —to feel it again. 

And so Elrond is still a bit absent, and doing up his cufflinks (also sapphire) when he steps onto the west-facing terrace at sundown. Celeborn stands at the railing, looking for his kestrels. Galadriel sits resplendent at the table; beholding her, Elrond might be easily convinced this was her dominion and not his: her handcrafted pine furniture, her personal selection of fine wines and cordials. 

Standing at Galadriel’s side is Lord Amroth. 

Elrond has perfected a range of neutral facial expressions, over the years, for use during moments of political import, of delicate phrasing and tense negotiation. None of them is able serve him as Lord Amroth makes immediate and disconcerting eye contact, a cold green glare deadly as cracking sea-ice. 

“Elrond!” Galadriel rises, smiling (?) and _embracing_ (??) him with a kiss to both cheeks. Her mirth is as lovely and unsettling as seeing the light of long-darkened Laurelin blossoming on the shores of Middle-earth. “You do remember Celebrían? It’s been ever so long.” 

Elrond blinks; the person standing before him shifts into focus. He did observe that Lord Amroth was dressed similarly to Lady Galadriel, in gowns of the same pattern—one of white, one of gray, both subtly studded with varicolored pearls. There are men’s garments with such necklines; Elrond has on occasion worn them. 

Yet his scattered thoughts have finally formed a single braid, entwining five centuries of idiocy: there is no Lord Amroth. 

“My Lady.” Elrond bows catastrophically, stuttering forward after an undue pause. In another situation there might be a subtly extended hand, an offer for it to be kissed. 

Celebrían smiles faintly, but makes no such extension, only nodding in acknowledgment. 

“My Lord.” 

And so Elrond rises and resorts to blathering. 

“I bid you welcome to Imladris. Our young settlement has yet to be graced by such beauty, and I do hope you find it is all to your standards. The eastern guest-halls were only recently finished, and I thought their overlook of the whirlpools might provide a meditative experience for your Ladyship…s. My architect is most innovative with the natural landscape, and all we displace we attempt to reincorporate—this, ah, very table, for instance!” He knocks on the wood. “From the white pines removed for the Hall of Fire.” 

Galadriel turns to her daughter with a knowing smile, which Celebrían does not reciprocate. 

“We are delighted to find you so well-ensconced. My husband has much praised your hospitality.” 

“He’s mostly praised the hawks,” mutters Celebrían. 

“I can hear you,” calls Celeborn, without turning around. 

“Well, if it was the hawks the drew you to Imladris, I praise them as well.” 

Celebrían stifles a confused laugh at this, which Elrond pretends not to have observed. 

(Nor to have felt a ghost of the frisson from the night of the new yén, shivered awake by silvery laughter.) 

“Refreshment?” he asks, indicating the many and well-curated options. 

The conversation that follows is as dizzying and machination-filled as any Elrond has had with Galadriel, with the added complication of Celebrían sitting beside her, looking exactly like the gorgeous Elf-lord whose face has haunted not a few of Elrond’s private reveries. 

Except that handsome face is now subtly scowling, clearly bored, and flanked by embarrassing parents—a condition that even Galadriel, for all her high lineage and proud bearing, is not immune to, although Celeborn seems to have been born for it. 

“I do long for the Sea,” Galadriel drawls, after a long dissection of King Amdír’s and Prince Amroth’s (the _real_ Amroth’s) failures of land stewardship in Lórinand. “Although Celebrían will miss all the cousins.” 

It seems her intent in retrieving her husband is for the entire family to travel far to the south; to what purpose seems a bit vague, but Elrond suspects Galadriel is still seeking her own dominion. 

“Plenty more cousins in Belfalas,” says Celeborn, temporarily reprieved of his monomaniacal observation of nature. “And not Falathrim. Sindas out of Doriath. Cousins I haven’t seen in an Age.” 

At this he drinks, in vague unease. 

Galadriel picks a loose thread from the shoulder of Celebrían’s dress, as her daughter stares into the middle distance. “It is a shame there is so little family left to be acquainted with on my side.” 

“If you travel by the coast, you might sojourn in Lindon.” In the midst of his disorientation, Elrond is obliged to perform some measure of diplomacy on behalf of the Crown. “Gil-galad will welcome you.” 

“Hm?” says Galadriel into her wineglass, although it might as well be, _Who?_

“Why have I never met my cousin the king, Mother?” 

The question is spoken as if its answer is already known; Celebrían’s tone is as practiced and piercing as Galadriel’s. 

“Imladris,” Galadriel changes the subject, turning to Elrond, “is a bastion of cousins. Elrond counts for about four of them. Distantly.” 

The last word is spoken with an assurance that no one seems to have asked for. 

Elrond does everything he can to avoid Celebrían’s eyes, devising his own change of subject. 

“Lady Nerdawen is here as well, working with the healers.” 

“Tyelpe’s Nerdawen?” Galadriel glances again to her daughter with implication. “One of your little friends, Celebrían.” 

Elrond does not remember an air of friendship between Nerdawen and the supposed Lord Amroth. 

Nor does Celebrían seem to, pulling a strange face. 

“I thought she would have sailed.” 

“People heal in different ways,” Elrond offers. 

It is the only thing he has said or done that causes something to shift in Celebrían’s countenance, subdued hostility shifting for a moment to inscrutable neutrality. 

Galadriel takes this two-sentence interchange as an opportunity. She has a clear thesis for the evening, and apparently for sojourning to Imladris at all, which she now states: 

“I’d like for the two of you to get to know each other better.” 

She smiles, as does Celeborn, once Galadriel touches his arm (breaking his concentration on a pair of nightingales fidgeting in the holly). 

“Indeed.” He picks up on his wife’s sentiment, completing some agreed-upon script. “Lord Elrond, would it impose on your hospitality for my family to join in my temporary residency? We’ll continue to the coast in due time, but…ah!” 

Some bird bursts forth, and Galadriel continues on his behalf. 

“There’s simply so much to take in, at Imladris. Wouldn’t you agree, Celebrían?” 

A thin smile, and inscrutable silence, which Elrond has no choice but to fill. 

“You are most welcome to take in it all.” He raises a glass, some libation poured at random, in a panic; something he has nearly drained but barely tasted. “To your residency.”

###

Elrond plays host the rest of the evening. (He has surprised himself by getting good at this.) Galadriel’s retinue is made up of Sinda scribes and artisans, who adore the invitation to sing songs all night with ever-replenished decanters of cordials and plates of cakes.

Meanwhile, her corps of Avarin guards linger on the margins of the halls, in the interstices meshed with the trees. Elrond tries to draw them in, finding after some trial and error with dialects that they are Kindi, but they seem to prefer vigilance. 

Celebrían sits among them, preferring the same. Speaking their tongue, turning away whenever Elrond approaches. He makes a deliberate effort not to overhear what they might be saying. 

It is not until the hearths are down to embers that Elrond finds his boldness, or succumbs at last to frustration. 

Celebrían is still not alone, standing with one of the Kindi on the balcony, where above them summer stars spill onto cloudless indigo, as the stars always do at Imladris. Down to the weather, this has been a perfectly orchestrated evening, and its host is beginning to feel he deserves some minor courtesy. 

The Kindi sees Elrond first, straightening their posture as he steps outside; they are strongly built, dark-haired, still wearing the lightweight armor from the journey. 

Celebrían turns over a shoulder.

“My lady,” he says—finding it easier, after dark, to confront the cold gaze. “I beg your pardon; might I have a word with you in private?” 

Celebrían’s tone is flat. “Rúnen can hear any word you might have with me.” 

“ _My Lord_ —” interjects Rúnen in the Kindi dialect.

Elrond turns to face the guard, before realizing the Lord she refers to is not him. 

Celebrían hisses back. “ _Stay_.” 

“ _I can continue in any number of languages,_ ” Elrond interjects in fluent Kindi; an obnoxious trick, but it gets them to stop and stare. 

He switches to Sindarin in his most politic register. 

“I only wish to say to you that if I have made any offense, I would welcome the opportunity to rectify it.” Elrond smiles graciously, before adding an amendment that comes spitefully unbidden. “I extend the same opportunity to you.” 

Celebrían steps toward him, and here is the Lord Amroth Elrond remembers: towering above him, proud and fearless. 

(Yet Rúnen has just called Celebrían _Lord_ as well, at which Elrond wonders, as his pulse quickens.) 

“I don’t believe I know what you mean, Lord Elrond,” 

“You have long owed me an apology. I remember our encounter some years ago at Ost-in-Edhil.” 

That _laugh_ , low now and throaty. “I remember it as well.” 

Elrond swallows back a feeling that, if left untended, might swell into something problematic. He channels these unwholesome energies into rhetoric. 

“And yet since arriving you have done nothing but refuse my kindnesses and stalk about my house like some entitled conqueror. My high esteem for your parents prohibits me from remarking on such things before them; I am therefore driven to settle the matter personally, as we are both well of age, in spite of your childish displays—”

“In spite of _yours_!” 

“I _beg_ your pardon?” 

“Imagine, Rúnen, whining about getting _kissed_ when one is as stunted and ill-tempered as Lord Elrond.” 

The mention of half-Mannish height is a low blow. “ _Stunted?!_ ” 

“I should probably go…?” says Rúnen in accented Sindarin. 

Yet they are trapped between an advancing Celebrían and an apoplectic Elrond, who finds himself at a rare loss for words as his cruel, handsome adversary descends on him. 

“You know it really wasn’t personal. My mother wants me to marry you; an obligation I abhor, extending to whatever prince- or lord-shaped thing she wishes to ensnare in it. But now”—silver-tongued words, grazing his ear with a liquid, almost-welcome hiss—“now, Lord Elrond, you’ve gone and made it _rather_ personal.” 

And then Celebrían is leaving, silk and pearl dragging away down up the steps to the hall. 

Elrond is left with clenched fists and a most inconvenient throb building between his legs. 

Rúnen pats him on the shoulder; a breach of decorum, but not an unwelcome one.

“It was a long journey,” they say. “Celebhîr can be much more charming than that, I assure you.” 

“I’m aware,” Elrond says, following the trailing figure’s path into the dying hearth-light. 

Then he realizes what he’s just heard. He turns to Rúnen. 

“Celebhîr?” 

The Kindi nods to Elrond, reflecting the confusion on his face with their own. And then they, too, have absconded, before there is any opportunity for follow-up questions. 

Celebhîr. Beneath the starlight, Elrond turns the name over. Not silver queen. 

Silver lord.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is turning into a beast, hope to have it up before long though!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warning for transphobia, misgendering, dead-naming, gender dysphoria.** Reiterating the disclaimer that this is my own personal interpretation for the purposes of this story of how TGNC identity might operate in a Tolkien Elf context. Glancing content warning for implication of sibling incest. 
> 
> This chapter is a little intense, and the rom-com/sex comedy vibes will resume next chapter :) But I wanted to trace how Celebhîr got to Rivendell.

**Lake Nenuial, the first century S.A.**

“A woman can be anything a man is, Celebrían.” 

To have the Lady Galadriel for your mother is to hear this same sentiment repeated ceaselessly, through the centuries of one’s life. To memorize in one’s body the unuttered second clause: 

_Yet this does not mean a woman should_. 

Men are architects of catastrophe, so driven in their destruction that they blind themselves and call it creation, call it progress, call it necessity. Mother’s uncle, who made the jewels and led the rebellion; his sons, her seven cousins, who made murder glamorous. 

That night—as the blood of Mother’s people ran thick into their own harbor, and she fought for them, she and her brothers alone not twisted into kinslaying, but defense only (though Fëanorians had fallen on her sword, too, though the ban was laid on them all)—that night she had foresworn following any man’s example, for the rest of her years. And hers would be long years, indeed. 

This did not mean Mother does not find some men useful, or even good. Father is both, of course. Like a forest that burns itself to cleanse, he is a warrior only when he needs to be. Otherwise his heart is turned to the observation of the world, not its transfiguration. Not to delving the earth, for he is wary of Dwarves and most Noldor, excepting his wife; not to deep ambition for anything in particular, though he knows many things, and is ever learning new ones. But never covetously, never with flame in his heart. This is called wisdom, but it is more like steadiness. 

It is what Mother needs, for the flame is in her. 

To the flame bodies are inconsequential, no matter _nís_ or _nér_. Mother knows this; it may be the deepest, truest thing she knows. 

And yet, Mother’s name from her own mother: Nerwen. Man-maiden.

###

(Celebhîr wonders, at times, if it was this name that drove his mother into exile, over anything else.)

(If this is why his parents gave their child only one name, with no allowance for another. _Silver_ from Celeborn, and _queen_ from Galadriel; for though she is not a queen in title, in her names she is a maiden crowned, a noble woman. Queenly; queen-adjacent.)

###

Family trees are his first reading-lessons, the shapes of the names of ancestors forever mnemonic in the tengwar with which they begin. He traces the lines backward and forward, forming a question.

“Emig?” 

“Yes, Celebrían?” 

“Can a lady not be King?” 

Galadriel sets down her papers beneath a heavy stone. The breeze off the lake rakes invisible fingers through her golden curls, gently rushes through the emerald grass, sends down the petals of fragrant trees. 

“The better question is whether there ought to be Kings at all.” His mother puts her private smile on. “For most of them have been very foolish.” 

“But you _would_ be High King,” he says, pointing to the book. “Wouldn’t you, if you were a man?” 

Galadriel snorts. “I should send you to Lindon to say that.” 

“Because the High King at Lindon…” He parses the genealogical line with his index finger, down and sideways. “His father was your brother-son. Artaher Orodreth.” 

His mother shades her fair face with her hand, looking out on the lake, at the geese honking in the shallows; some glide serenely, others splash and wrestle for dominance. 

“That is another thing I don’t like about kings, sweet daughter. People tell kind lies about them, and then the lies get put into books like that.” 

He sits up, drawing his skirts under his knees. The book is laid open before him, generations stitched together in an intricate lace. And yet his father is not in the book. He is not in the book. So the book is not true. His mother is right; his mother is always right, except when she calls him _daughter._

“What lies do they tell about the King?” he asks. 

His mother is kind and his mother is beautiful. And yet beauty can be fearsome; kindness is a two-faced coin. He is still learning the borders of her anger, and each time new acreage reveals itself feels a kind of dazzled power in being shown. An intimacy with her fire. 

“My brother-son Orodreth had no son,” Galadriel says, her voice casting a strange dark shadow on the summer’s day. “And the King’s father was a kinslayer. One of the worst, who was dispossessed of the line. Dispossessed he should have stayed.” 

The boy considers this. 

“But who is the King’s mother?”

Galadriel’s response is brief, and yet this, years later, is most of what he remembers, the sharp glance, the short words. 

“A woman who destroyed herself.”

###

**Ost-in-Edhil, the ninth century S.A.**

The first name he tries on is borrowed. _Amroth_ , a distant cousin east and south of the mountains, a full-Sinda prince leaping from tree to tree. Something about it sounds high and romantic. And besides, what business would a lordling with his own glittering forests ever have in dour Eregion, land of gravel and stunted hollies? The original Amroth will never have to know of his stolen moniker. 

“I’ll call you whatever you want,” Nerdawen says. “Just stop wearing that pretentious cape.” 

“We’ll do a trade,” says Amroth. “First, unlace your corset.” 

Nerdawen seems angry that this is working on her, and kisses him with teeth to show it.

###

There were other girls at Nenuial, when he was a girl. (For this is how he thinks of it: though _he_ is continuous, has been from the beginning, there was a time when he performed the part in earnest, before the cracks began to show.) Giggling trysts, swimming in the nude, pinkies entwined, flowers woven into one another’s braids. The sort of thing his mother approved of.

 _It’s perfectly healthy, Celebrían, to experiment before you are well and truly bonded to a_ nér. _The body is a gift of Eru._

His body is not a gift. 

At Ost-in-Edhil he is supposed to be a princess, in presentation if not title. There are trappings beyond belief, the spoils of every Dwarvish goldsmith and Elvish jewel-wright not swallowed by the sea. Galadriel refuses all but the most deceptively simple in their decadence. For her child she reserves the rest. 

_Try this, Celebrían. And with the tiara, and the opal teardrops…Gods, but you look like my mother, sometimes._

Man-maiden. All the maiden-ness she could not swallow, cannot incorporate into her being, she puts into a daughter she thinks is there. 

(He has watched birds feeding their young, with his father, birds who regurgitate into their children’s throats.)

###

Amroth sees to it that Nerdawen is undressed first, so that he might descend on her without taking off the last of his shirts, the one that keeps him held together.

“That’s not fair.” 

“Yes, it is.” 

“I like tits as much as you do.” Nerdawen pouts as Amroth burrows and bites into hers, silently, heretically praising the house of Fëanor, lineage of busty blacksmiths. 

He looks up, shrugging. “I don’t have any tits.” 

“I can _feel_ them.” 

“Then you’re mistaken.” 

Nerdawen shifts upward, red curls radiant and all her gold glimmering in the lamplight. Amroth takes the opportunity to press searching kisses down her neck, taking the curve of her ass in his hand, beginning to rock into her with his muscled thigh. 

She keens, clawing her hands around him, scrabbling up his back under the shirt, but never seeking the other side. 

“You wish you could take me like a man, don’t you,” she hisses in his ear. 

“Wrong again,” murmurs Amroth. “I _am_ a man, and I’m already taking you just as I wish.”

###

But he isn’t, not in a way that the world understands, though Amroth knows the truth of himself more surely then anything.

Fortunately, there are alchemists of many kinds in Ost-in-Edhil, and some of them think about bodies. Not only how they might be mended, but how they might be remade. 

The wiser of these alchemists do not widely publicize their work. They know that for many it holds the whiff of Thangorodrim. Some of them were thralls there. 

“If there were methods people had in Aman, they were very secret, and have been long forgotten.” Carmandë hums a snatch of work-song as she stokes the flame beneath the autoclave. “A Sinda physician of my acquaintance was more help, having learned of the Avari methods, though he’s mainly dealt with the other way around. So I’ve had to try my own recipe.” 

The old Noldo’s smile is wry, and twisting further where the burn begins; it covers half her body to the shoulder. 

“How will it work?” asks Amroth, concealing his apprehension—his fear—with bluntness. The workshop is a tiny, cramped thing, down a half-forgotten alley in the medical district. Infinite glass vials and earthenware jars threaten to bury the proprietor from teetering shelves. 

“You well know that a stone may be convinced to change color or shape, with a bit of song and heat. Bodies are not so different from stones, only they have their own heat to begin with, and the song, well…” Carmandë sighs. “It takes some persuasion, to shift the song from its intent.” 

“But isn’t everything part of the Theme?” Amroth says. “Me coming to you, asking for this. It must be sung as well.” 

The alchemist shuffles over to her autoclave, opening the fastener. 

“I have lived a long time, little lord. In my experience song is more a matter of practicality than belief. But I do like your spirit.” 

Amroth watches as she removes the heated substance and grinds it in a mortar, then funnels the powder into gelatin capsules. She bottles them, and Amroth takes the bottle. 

“Let’s see if we might shift the tune a bit.”

###

The pills make him vomit. Still he takes them all, sickens himself with conviction, until he returns to Carmandë’s workshop and she suggests they should try a poultice instead, applied every night through the skin.

The poultice is more successful. Maybe. Perhaps it is still mostly his conviction, he thinks at first. 

Yet changes do come, small accumulations that begin to alter his shape. He has always been there, behind the sheen of woman, daughter, _silver queen._ But now he begins to surface, beyond the privacy of his trysts with Nerdawen, beyond the certainty he has always felt when he is alone. Certainty spreads over him now like a new skin. 

His body shifts, becoming sharper where it was soft. He has always been strong, and tall, but there is a weight to him now that he revels in, the muscles knotting in new ways under the skin.

The treatment has other effects. He still must bind his chest, does so second-nature each morning; but his sex is changing into its own new and strange shape, growing larger. It does not look like the cocks he has seen, but it feels as one. 

He has always wanted women; in these early days the want surpasses anything he has known. 

Fine-boned Sinda musicians, gorgeous Dwarrowdams with gilded braids in surprising places, seasoned Gwaith craftswomen who laugh at his eagerness but give him beautiful cocks to use, ingenious cocks of crystal or light stone that he slings into a leather harness. 

Nerdawen, in between them all, who is never jealous until he asks if her sister can join them. This she refuses; and after Amroth takes up with Nathriel of his own accord, the other twin stops speaking to him entirely.

###

His mother is wise beyond measure, but his mother does not always pay attention. She has Eregion to govern, a balancing act with her cousin who says he won’t rule, and yet cannot help but do so implicitly with the loyalty he inspires in his people.

Amroth thinks he is taking advantage of Galadriel’s political distractions, until she stops him one morning as he is dressing. 

“What’s this I keep hearing about a Lord Amroth, who scandalizes the entire city?” 

He latches the tunic over his bound chest, turns away from the mirror to walk past her without answering. Galadriel stops him. Not with force—it is that gaze, that fire, finally turned on what it has overlooked. 

“You disgrace me, Celebrían, when I can least afford it.” 

He says nothing, only breaks away from the searing light of his mother’s eyes to search for his outer robes. The truth revealed between them, then; before her, he continues dressing as himself. At formal dinners, the occasional mother-daughter afternoon teas that the Lady of Eregion’s seneschal fits in her schedule, he has yielded to the gowns, performed the part he knows too well. But now she knows. How long has she known? 

His mother can perceive people’s hearts—trace, if imperfectly, the shape of possible futures. Surely now, after long-years, centuries, she must _see_ him. 

Instead, a rare sight indeed: his mother with a sheen in her eyes. Not spilling, ever contained. Surely calculated to provoke his own tears, his capitulation. 

She does see. And she does not approve. 

_What are you doing, my daughter?_

Her voice in his head. 

“Destroying myself,” Amroth says aloud. 

And it’s then the dam breaks, the clouds roil. The servants flee in terror to unoccupied regions of her ladyship’s apartments. It is a war now, both sides equally vicious in their attack, and yet one has the greater arsenal. Her preferred weapon is exile.

###

**Eryn Galen, the tenth century S.A.**

“I don’t understand you, cousin.” 

Thranduil is lying in the moss, bedecked even in his hunting garb with as many flowers as possible. More lilies-of-the-valley twine his white-blonde braids than hair. 

“There’s not so much difference between men and women, really, so why insist on being one or the other?” 

Beside him Cel sits tightly coiled, knees to chest. He cannot be Amroth, here among the Sindar, and so answers to the part of the name that does not alienate him. This is a concession he makes out of exhaustion more than anything else. No more of Carmandë’s treatments remain in his pack; supplies were dwindling when his mother sent him to join his father in the Greenwood, and there was no opportunity to replenish. Some of the effects remain, but this leaves Cel in a suspended state, halfway between what he wants and what he doesn’t. 

The Sindar are more like that, anyway, than the Noldor, so at least Eryn Galen is a good place to be in-between. Women and men dress similarly, sometimes looking indistinguishable. (There is even a word for people who are neither, their bodies and hearts refusing categorization. _Gwegwin_ , a whispered word, but a word nonetheless, absent from Cel’s Western dialect; untranslatable into Quenya.) Women are also more commonly scouts and warriors; this is certainly not unknown, among the Noldor, but it is perceived more often as a necessity than a convention.

And so Thranduil is right, in his way. And yet: the Woodland Prince spends his days idle, whether hunting in the forests or presiding over the woodland court, while his father Oropher makes political pawns of the Prince’s sisters, marrying them off to prominent Avari traders and Nandorin fief-lords to consolidate his power in Rhovanion. 

Cel picks at the ferns, looking sidewise to Thranduil. “Have you never known a single person who wished to…change themself?” 

The Prince props up to his elbows, a wily grin on his face. 

“They say that all of Queen Melian’s handmaidens were Avari spearmen, once, who gave themselves willingly to her enchantments.” 

That particular tale of Doriath never made it into his bedtime stories. Cel throws a frond at Thranduil. 

“A real person, not ancient rumor.” 

Thranduil takes the thrown fern between his teeth, looking contemplatively to the forest canopy. It is thin here, an emerald lace over white sky. 

“It might do you to talk to Sildor,” he muses, and then sits up in excitement, convincing himself. “Yes, cousin, I think you _should_ talk to Sildor!” 

Sildor does not seem to think Cel should talk to him. 

“I know your father,” is all he says, gathering branches from the perimeter of his camp outside Oropher’s halls. 

“Most people do,” Cel says. He tries to keep annoyance from his voice, as the old Sinda putters indifferently. 

“Does he know you’ve come to me?” 

“I don’t see how it should make any difference whether he does.” 

Sildor sets down the bundle, wiping the wood-dust from his hands. He is slight, and grey-haired—not a youthful silver, but long-dulled brown. 

“I was a medic among the Marchwardens of Doriath. We served together, for a time.” 

Cel knows of his father’s rotation of assignments in the Hidden Kingdom, as might be expected of a prince: a little diplomacy, a little of the healing arts. And a little soldiering, though not on the front lines of the March. It wasn’t until later he became a true warrior, once the Girdle was broken, and everyone had to be. 

“So?” 

“I saw him court your mother. I know the high standards she held for him.” The Sinda crosses his arms. “I imagine the same apply to her daughter.” 

Cel’s eyes narrow. “Her daughter I am not.” 

Sildor’s expression is strange. 

“So I guessed.” 

But he will not say anything more. 

Cel has to come back every day and help him collect sticks. Thranduil accompanies him in this task, more often than not; Cel knows he finds his unconventional half-Noldo cousin amusing, but does not fully grasp the Prince’s motivations until Sildor’s line of work becomes clear. Concealed in the apparent wilderness around his camp is a meticulous farming operation for potently hallucinogenic mushrooms. Much fuel is needed for the dehydration ovens, and in Eryn Galen you do not cut down a tree unless you absolutely have to. 

Thranduil has the allowances to purchase as many drugs as he wants, but it seems he prizes the opportunities afforded to volunteers to sample new cultivars. 

Cel refrains from sampling. The forest is strange enough, especially once night falls. Thranduil can feel his way home through the trees in any number of altered states, but Cel fears the places where the path turns treacherous. 

One such night Thranduil partakes too much too close to twilight, and Cel and Sildor have to lay him out to giggle it off by the fire. Together they sit in a silence that Sildor might find companionable, as he whittles and hums to himself, but that to Cel brims with unspoken tension. 

“You’re _like_ me,” he says finally. 

The Sinda keeps his eyes on his handiwork. “Perhaps in some ways.” 

“Do you have the medicines I need?” 

Sildor tilts up a firelit eye. “Medicine?” 

At last, Cel lets it all rush out in a breath. 

“In my city, an alchemist made me a treatment. A poultice, that made me more like a man. She said it was a Sinda method. I need to know if you are like me, and if you have something…like that. That I can have. Soon.” 

Sildor laughs a little under his breath. “Many questions at once.” 

“Then you need answer only the last.” 

The fire snaps. Across the flames Thranduil holds a leaf in front of his face, slowly examining it in disbelief. 

“There is no Sinda method,” Sildor says. “The Avari are by far most practiced with the herbal treatments. But if you think a Noldo alchemist mixing some poultice is what you need to be a man—” 

He will only raise his brow. 

Then Sildor starts to hum again, much to Cel’s exasperation. Until the hum shifts to song, in a language Cel can’t recognize—and yet somehow understands, as it seeps under his skin, and down his throat like a quenching draught of water.

###

“ _Fileg_?”

After a long trance over some naturalist treatise, Celeborn looks up one afternoon when they are together on the talan. He calls Cel a childhood pet-name recently resurrected: _Little bird_ , of course. His father is delicate with him. Cel isn’t sure he prefers this to his mother’s outright hostility. 

Cel looks up. “What, Ada?” 

“You and Thranduil seem to like one another.” 

“Hm.” 

“Oropher and I have discussed a match.” 

Cel snaps his book shut. “Ada, he’s my cousin!” 

“Not so near a cousin, really.” Celeborn stirs his tea. “And I think you’ll find most marriage prospects are.” 

His father is casual about these matters. At times too casual. 

“All the better if you are naturally disposed to a cousinly closeness, without being too close in blood. Look at your mother and me.” 

Cel retches.

###

Sildor begins to teach him the song Melian taught to her handmaidens, for the ancient rumors have truth to them, as most do.

It is in the language of the Gods, or a version of it. When Cel asks if he knows what the words mean Sildor says that isn’t how he should think about it. 

Also: it is not one song. Sildor has his own variation, and tells Cel he will make his own when he has practiced enough. 

What he also says: the song does not change you. It reveals you. It is not an enchantment, for such things cannot last a lifetime in the _rhaw_ of an Elf. It can be combined with the herbal treatments and amplify their affects, but it does not need to be. What the song does is bring you into focus, the truth of your _fae_ that others misperceive. 

It can be long in taking effect, thought, and the correction in the eyes of others varies based on depth of misperception. Sildor says this drily. But he has not taken any herb in years. 

“That doesn’t sound like it does anything,” says Cel, though he knows well enough it does _something_ , has felt the music thrum in him like rising tide. 

“You Noldor, always needing peer review and proof of concept.” Cel about to object with _half-Noldor_ , or only a quarter, really, when Sildor continues: “It was good enough for your High King.”

Fingon. Cel has long filled in the blanks of his mother’s foreboding stories. 

“How do you know about that?” 

“I was there.” 

Cel considers this. “High King Fingon was allowed into Doriath?” 

But Sildor shakes his head. “While he was still Prince, his father orchestrated a very careful trade. Five Valarin breeding-stallions, of a much-dwindled stock, for the discreet errand to Dor-lómin of five specialist healers trained in the Queen’s arts.” 

“Athnothrim,” Cel says, using the word Sildor has taught him. Getting used to its shape on his tongue. People who cross; people on both sides. 

It is not spoken openly that Fingon was one of them, but people seem to _know_ nonetheless, to learn the way Cel did, from whispers. 

Cel looks to Sildor. “My mother was also trained in the Queen’s arts.” 

He wonders what his mother knows of this, but then remembers _a woman who destroyed herself_ , and thinks he has his answer. 

“Arts of a different kind,” says Sildor. “Melian was many things to many people.” 

Cel nods. Galadriel has her water-craft, and her foresight. He has sensed, at times smugly, that this is an art his mother has far from perfected, even after all these years—yet he has also seen it consume her, with joy and fascination, as Celebrimbor is consumed by perfecting a design. Surely Melian gave her a great gift, in this. Could she not see value in the gifts given to others? 

“If the Queen herself was guiding the Athnothrim in Doriath,” Cel asks, “why is it not spoken of?” 

Sildor sighs grimly. “There will never again be a kingdom like Melian’s. She was a queen who understood her people’s desires, foremost among them her husband’s. Elu Thingol was as one with her; he was the first to be changed by her, in his way. But his desire went astray in the end. Much was lost in the fall.” 

He looks into the distance now, as if seeing something between the trees. Cel knows what that look means; knows he was born into a broken world. 

After a while Sildor stands. 

“If our woodland kings remember anything of the Athnothrim, I think it is mostly a lesson to avoid the scandal Fingolfin had on his hands.” He says this with a dark grin. “To prevent their more enterprising daughters from becoming folk heroes in the first place, so they don’t have to pretend they were their firstborn sons all along.” 

Sildor offers Cel a hand to rise from the ground. It is late afternoon; only so much more daylight he can use to get back to the King’s halls. 

“I don’t think the Noldor wish it was remembered at all,” Cel says. “My mother always told me the body is a gift of Eru. That to alter it is an affront to the Theme.” 

Sildor gives him a wary look. “I hope you mother comes rarely to Eryn Galen,” he says.

###

The match being discussed seriously. King Oropher extends pointed invitations to court, which Cel is obliged to accept as a guest of the realm—as _Celebrían_ , whoever that is, a shell that skulks in the corners of vine-encrusted ballrooms.

Thranduil takes it for sport, at first. 

“Let’s pretend to flirt,” he whispers, knowing this will leverage his prospects with whatever lissome pipe-player or brawny gamekeeper he has his sights on. 

But Cel’s stoic silence speaks to him, eventually. When Thranduil’s father asks him to make a formal proposal, the Prince climbs up to Cel’s talan at night. They face each other cross-legged by the light of a silver lantern. 

“It might not be so bad.” Thranduil shrugs. “A way to keep up appearances, since you go for women, anyway, and I for men.” 

Once he realizes how he’s said this he starts to apologize. 

“I meant, cousin—” 

“You don’t have to tell me what you mean,” Cel mutters. 

Thranduil casts his eyes down, and after a while longer sitting in strained silence slips off to the rope-ladder.

###

The Prince will not propose. Oropher is not pleased with his son. Cel sees how Thranduil’s easy gait gets waited down, how his eyes are nervous under his gossamer crowns. The match would have been an advantageous one for the Woodland Realm. Perhaps it was wrong to think only Thranduil’s sisters have been used as pawns.

(His sisters, though, would never have been afforded the chance to refuse.) 

Cel feels relieved, and he feels guilty—about Thranduil, even about things faring awkwardly for Celeborn. Cel’s father is not outwardly angry with him—it is not his way—but he slips into a state of stoic anxiety, neglecting his birdwatching routines, silently conversing with Galadriel. For Oropher’s hospitality is running out: soon it becomes clear that their stay in Eryn Galen will be coming to an end. 

When summer comes, and the mountain passes are cleared, they begin the long journey to Eregion.

###

**Ost-in-Edhil, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries S.A.**

“Your father had his good intentions,” says Galadriel. “Yet that arrangement was not meant to be. I see a different fate for you.” 

When he is sick of such smug and cryptic commentaries on his supposed fate—about three days after returning to Eregion—he determines to leave his mother’s house forever. He confounds her accountants into giving him a good part of his inheritance, finds lodgings on the cave-side of the city. Pays a visit to Carmandë at her shop. Practices his song. 

Before long Ost-in-Edhil is abuzz with gossip about the return of Lord Amroth. 

Strangely, his parents do nothing to stop him. He concludes that the disavowal must be mutual. 

These are good years. 

The city is at its height, of innovation and of decadence. With the inheritance he absconds with, Lord Amroth becomes a serious investor in both. He gets in on the ground on some novel pipe-weed technology and for a while becomes hilariously wealthy. He finds a larger apartment, throws parties, gets an invitation to every occasion worth going to—among the Gwaith, that is. Amroth reacquaints himself with old lovers, finds himself delightfully ensnared in a web of liaisons among brilliant people, people as strange and as daring in their beauty as he wants to be. 

On one memorable occasion, Lord Annatar himself, with his eyes flickering gold, asks Amroth where he got his opal-encrusted slippers. 

People know who Amroth is; if his identity is a scandal, at first, it fades to a fact of life, one of many curiosities on the glittering scene in Ost-in-Edhil. His parentage, his past, seem less and less relevant the longer he goes without speaking to Galadriel and Celeborn. 

One new yén’s night, he gets drunk and kisses the emissary from Lindon on a dare. 

“Oh my Gods, that was Lord _Elrond_ ,” says Nathriel, when he returns from this errand. 

"Who?" Amroth says, taking another shot of Khazad-dûm’s finest rotgut. 

He remembers, in the queasy morning, that Lord Elrond is not only a senior-most advisor to High King Gil-galad, but a friend and longtime correspondent of his mother’s. For a day or so afterward Amroth experiences some minor anxiety, waiting for a consequence to follow this transgression. And yet none comes. 

Amroth feels invincible, master of his destiny. His own man. 

Then something begins to shift. 

The Gwaith’s distance from Galadriel becomes skepticism, then suspicion: that she wants to dissolve the trade unions, that she has plans to lock Celebrimbor out of his own forge. Lord Annatar stops paying Amroth compliments and starts whispering into people’s ears, rumors of his blood fealty, his true loyalties. 

Soon, whenever Amroth walks into a room, he finds familiar faces steeled against him. Soon he is destitute from failed investments, and his friends seem fewer each day. 

Everything that meant Amroth is sloughed away. 

A letter comes from his mother, impersonal in tone: she is leaving Eregion, giving the regency to Celebrimbor as the Gwaith have long demanded. 

_Your father will stay,_ Galadriel writes, providing no explanation for the strategic or emotional implications of this, only saying: _I intend to travel to Lórinand via Moria, and you know how he is about Dwarves._

The final sentence, before his mother’s confident, intricate signature, the initials of her many names in a complex interlocking spiral: 

_There is a place for you in the caravan, Celebrían, if you wish it._

###

Why does he go?

On the journey to Lórinand Galadriel is as cool as ever at the surface, yet evidence shows of her disturbance: how she will not sleep, but stays up by the firelight in a kind of mournful contemplation. Cel would call it a sulk, if he could successfully picture his mother as the serious adolescent she was long ago in Aman. 

If he is exhausted by the events of the past few years, he knows Galadriel must be far more so. 

Cel pities his mother, and pities himself for accepting her pity. Her forgiveness. 

They do not speak very much. Cel thinks of himself as a fellow traveler, following behind with the Sinda guards. Yet once they pass through the mountains, and the novelties of the Dwarvish realm are no longer there to distract, there is less he can do to avoid her. 

He strays from the camp at night to practice his song. It has frayed on the journey, and over the past year. He feels less certain than ever of the shape of the words, language he does not understand save when it swells into his muscles with certainty, a sense of rightness that has eluded Cel in recent memory. Even if Lord Amroth still existed, he could not in Lórinand, where Prince Amroth reigns. 

Still he keeps singing, trying to summon the shape of a new person. 

His mother finds him one night—perhaps because she is seeking him out, perhaps because she is simply lost in her own private wanderings. 

“Who taught you that song?” 

Cel hears her voice, but he cannot see her, and does not turn to look as he answers. 

“A Sinda of Eryn Galen. Formerly of Doriath.” He pauses. “One of the Athnothrim.” 

Galadriel steps out of the shadows in her simple travel dress. Tilion is very bright tonight, casting everything before him in a bluish light, and everything that turns away in velvet black. 

“I would be wary of any gifts the Maiar make of their arts. Certainly any that come secondhand.” 

Cel narrows his eyes, trying to bring his mother into focus in the darkness between the trees. 

“But Melian gave you gifts.” 

“Yes, and every day I am wary of them.” 

Galadriel settles against a tree trunk. She looks up to the stars. 

“And what of the arts your people learned of the Powers in Aman?” Cel asks. 

“Things were different in Aman. There were boundaries. For Melian, for this Annatar…” 

Galadriel’s voice goes distant, with apprehension, regret, all that his mother does not understand about her political adversary. About her defeat. 

“…those who have come to walk among us in Middle-earth seem to prefer a certain intimacy with their students.” 

Cel has never met a Maia; he doesn’t think he ever will. All he wants is to be himself. 

His jaw clenches. “I know you do not approve of me, Mother, but—” 

Galadriel stops him with a hand to his cheek. 

_My child, whose_ fëa _was cloven from mine._

Cel does not want to meet her gaze, the Tree-light that has dazzled him from childhood, but it has always been hard to look away.

 _How can you say such things? For I know you are perfect, and were made perfectly._

Cel was not made perfectly. He was simply _made_. Is still being made. 

Yet he has never been adept in _ósanwë_ , in the manner of his parents. Whatever he communicates to his mother is lost in transmission, too confused, too enraged. 

Still she looks upon him as if she has understood. Cel wants to tell her she hasn’t, not at all, but his mother slips away again, and he is left standing in the shadows.

###

**Lórinand, the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries S.A.**

In Lórinand they come to a kind of truce. While his mother insinuates herself in the court of his father’s cousin King Amdír—it doesn’t take much, with her tales of Alqualondë of old, her long affiliation with Doriath—Cel slips into the part of warrior. Seeming to know how warriors will be needed in the days to come, Galadriel does seem to not object. 

It is humbling. He spends decades training with children, Elves far under their majority who have spent most of their short lives with bows in their hands and knives at their belts. Cel fails, over and over. 

Yet failure is his natural state. He has failed as his mother’s daughter, failed as a charming and influential Elf-lord. He may as well fail at soldiering. 

And so Cel wakes up every day for a yén and more to get trounced by forty-year-olds with practice swords.

###

As in Eryn Galen, Amdír’s small court clings to a memory of Doriath—everyone, it seems, has their own conception of Menegroth-that-was. The people he governs are largely intermarried Nandor and Sindar, paying little heed to cultural distinctions swept long ago beneath the seas. Coexistent but distinct is a population of Avari, who prefer to live like the marchwardens of old in settlements outside the kingdom center. The corps of woodland scouts is largely made up of their kindred.

After countless small failures in learning the art of combat, Cel is finally accepted among the scouts once it is no longer possible to refuse the services of any willing soldier. Orcs are beginning to cross their borders; in the East, an enemy as arisen anew, a servant of Morgoth who compensates for lesser divinity with greater cunning. Indeed, rather than plundering and maiming, he has ensnared the Elves in willing collaboration. Cel watched him do it, working the room at countless Ost-in-Edhil cocktail parties. 

Annatar. Sauron, he’s going by now, shedding his lovely raiment for a beauty far crueler. 

Celebrimbor himself comes to Lórinand, bringing Galadriel some kind of weapon (surely along with a not-insubstantial portion of crow, to eat before her). Fractures between the cousins are reforged as alliance; the asset’s safeguarding becomes the kingdom’s priority. Celeborn accompanies the party from Eregion, having been a key architect of this reunion of trust, in his sequester these past years at Ost-in-Edhil. He seems immensely relieved to be back in a Sinda realm, and along with Prince Amroth musters the woodland scouts and Amdír’s royal guard into an army. 

Cel joins the rank and file. He sings his song, finds himself in the shadowy choreography of woodland combat. 

The Avari understand who he is without curiosity or confusion. They have their own words for the people Sildor called the Athnothrim, vocabulary more particular and more expansive. It seems to Cel that in the stark divide between what is called nér or nís, ellon or elleth, is in fact an immeasurable range of shadings—what he would once have called _gwegwin_ , yet this now seems a wholly inept term, knowing people who live within this spectrum. His new friend Rúnen laughs in his face, when Cel asks them if this is what they are.

“Man-woman,” they say. “Really?”

It is all Cel nears to hear. Yet there are others more like him, crossing from one side to another. A few of their kind make use of herbal treatments Carmandë approximated for him in Eregion. They share their sources with him to experiment, find a new balance; he learns their songs and shares his own. 

He is changing again, into something that feels more solid. Even his Sinda cousins among the troops, men and women fighting together who draw no such distinctions when routing an Orc ambush and yet blush and hide their forms in the barracks—they begin to see him as he is. Begin to call him by a new name.

###

“My name is Celebhîr,” Celebhîr says, one spring morning.

Various untouched nut-cakes and venison products span the table between him and his parents. He cannot recall the last time he was alone with both of them, much less that they all had breakfast together. 

Separately, when Celeborn is leading combat drills and Galadriel running circles around Amdír’s court, his father and mother seem vital, elegant, ruthless. Seated side by side they blur into one another, gold muddied with silver. They look very, very old. 

Celeborn smiles absently at Celebhîr’s pronouncement. 

“As you wish, _fileg_ ,” he says. 

Galadriel looks upon her child. Her clear, Tree-lit eyes betray no inner strife. 

“You are entitled to your _epessë_ ,” she says. “And I to my _amilessë_. One name does not blot out the other.” 

With that, she gets up and walks off into the forest: declaring, without a word, that the conversation is complete.

###

Things break bad in the North, then worse. Lórinand is far closer to Mordor and continues to receive its share of assaults. But it is a small kingdom, and the Enemy does not spare much thought on lesser prizes. When Eregion and Lindon have fallen, it will be taken along with everything else.

And Eregion is falling fast. Celeborn leads a force northward, intending to sortie with Oropher’s Nandorin troops before crossing the mountains. Whatever alliance was fractured by their children’s failed engagement grows robust again, under the shadow of Barad-dûr. 

Celebhîr asks to go with his father. This is a true war, the first of his lifetime. If the prospect of that is terrifying, it is likewise not a little thrilling to think of the assembled hosts, the sea of sun-glinting spears. 

But Celeborn had shaken his head. 

“You will stay, and aid Amroth.” 

Celebhîr’s cousin—and his former namesake, though this fact he conceals—has a good mind for strategy and inspires great loyalty among his warriors. He is not aloof from them, as princes of other realms might be, but plainspoken and direct. In combat, Celebhîr works well under him as a force captain, respects his determinations and his orders even when they are delivered spitting and expletive-studded. 

The Amroth who exists out of uniform is a different story. 

Celebhîr supposes it some sort of Thematic comeuppance, the fact that the person whose name he once stole proceeds to develop a very unwanted crush—not on _him_ , but on a woman he seems to think is there. 

If that wasn’t enough, Amroth attempts courtship with the same blunt instruments he brings to battle, barging into conversations and blushing like a roast pheasant. 

“Lady Celebrían—” he says. 

“Celebhîr,” corrects some sympathetic soldier. 

“Of course, my apologies. Lady Celebhîr—might I interest you in a turn about the willow trees?”

###

It is a fell day when half the remaining Lórinand troops march northward under their Prince, the defense of Eregion needing reinforcements once again. Yet Celebhîr is happy to be rid of Amroth, a secret relief running beneath guilt and sorrow. He remains behind with the woodland guard, watching friends and cousins descend into the churn of war.

The horror of fallen Ost-in-Edhil sits on the kingdom like a dense fog. Galadriel’s thoughts are continuously present with Celeborn on the front, a conduit that must sustain and yet exhaust both of them. When she learns of Celebrimbor’s final defense, his nightmarish death, she spares no detail in reporting it to the court and diminished guard. 

There is nothing to do but hold the borders, keep watch on woods that turn alien under the creeping shadow of the Enemy. These are years when Celebhîr cannot remember sleeping, only his muscles tensed, his gear splattered with foul blood, his eyes ever tracing shapes in the darkness.

###

When the war comes to its mangled end, Celeborn and Amroth return with a much-diminished host. Lórinand holds fast in its grief—and fear, for though the enemy is retreated his gates lie closer to theirs than any other domain of Elves in Middle-earth.

Celebhîr is a warrior now. He cannot imagine another kind of life. Yet the upheaval of war has led Amdír and Amroth to contemplate the future of their kingdom, the solidification of alliances. The securing of heirs. 

In the years after Amroth’s return Celebhîr takes the woods, avoiding the inevitable marriage proposal. Hauling _ungol_ -spawn carcasses to be burnt in odiferous piles, living off of venison jerky and moonshine, sensuous moonlit nights on the first watch with fellow scouts who don’t mind mixing business with pleasure—life among the border guard is infinitely preferable to the staid invitations he receives from Amdír’s court. The best that can be said of them is that the royal stationery makes for good kindling. 

Finally, Amroth takes matters into his own hands. He rides to the camp flanked by knights, in his silver crown and white mail, and gets down on one knee before Celebhîr, who is wearing a deerskin poncho that stinks of dead spider. 

“Your mother has consented—” he begins. 

Yet before the Prince can go any further, Celebhîr has stolen his horse and is riding to confront Galadriel. 

She looks up from the worktable in her garden, as if expecting him, smiling obscurely as he flings open the gates. 

“Celebrían. To what do I owe the pleasure?” 

Celebhîr swallows his usual objections to the wielding of that name, in favor of more pressing matters. 

“You would _give_ me to that man, like some trinket?” 

Galadriel turns her eyes in distraction back to her scattered paperwork. “Amroth is a sensible match. I was merely expressing approval.” 

His mother’s nonchalance only makes him more furious. 

“With your approval he has made a formal proposal, _Mother_.” 

“Has he?” Galadriel glances up again, her splintery gaze held even. “Well, given our position in the kingdom, it would be wise of you to accept. I’d prefer Amdír didn’t turn us out, the way Oropher did you and your father.” 

Celebhîr has had his limbs ensnarled in webs of viscous spider-silk. Extracting himself was an easier task than having a simple conversation with his mother, let alone an argument of which only she can foretell the conclusion. 

But he cannot believe she truly would see him wedded to Amroth. 

“Amroth wants a wife.” He swallows back his rage, attempting to match Galadriel’s cool tone but still finding himself fracturing at the surface. “I will not be that. Cannot be.” 

“Indeed,” Galadriel continues, stone-faced. “For you are too proud to accept the responsibility of your lineage. To understand that we inhabit a delicate balance, among our kindred, which you would disorder with your selfish whims.” 

Celebhîr’s eyes hold back hot, treacherous tears. 

“I am not a woman,” he says. 

His mother sighs; a tiny crack in her countenance, for this is the conversational turn past which there is no chance of mutual comprehension. 

Galadriel treats it as a stitch out of joint, re-threads the needle into her proscribed pattern. 

“If you refuse Amroth we will have to leave Lórinand.” 

Her words are meant to punish him. But now his mother is smiling again, disarmingly, as if the tension of the past moments has already evaporated high into the trees. 

“And yet there are better prospects I can think of. We may still have a chance to find ourselves in a favorable position.” 

Galadriel springs to her feet, patting Celebhîr on his reddened cheek as if he is still a child. 

“Yes, my darling. We ought to get packing.”

###

The wheels he can see turning within his mother’s mind always conceal other wheels.

Galadriel has been restless since the end of the war. There is a pretense to Amdír and Amroth about sojourning to the southern coast, to the Sinda settlement at Belfalas. And of needing Celeborn’s consent to inform the decision on the proposal—as if his wife could not resolve the matter with a moment’s _ósanwë_. 

In order to provide their answer, his family will seek him in Imladris—a surprise visit. (“It does well to keep things interesting, over the course of a long marriage,” Galadriel says. “You’ll understand what I mean, someday.”) Celeborn has been living at the nascent stronghold for several years, shoring up Lord Elrond’s defenses. 

Elrond. Throughout the journey Galadriel speaks the name with great insinuation. 

“He’s really quite bright, Celebrían. Actually interested in the world, and never convinced he’s learned all there is to know about it. And he’s kind, as well, even in moments of disagreement, of which we have had not a few. I saw great promise in him as a child that I daresay is on its way to fulfilment.”

His mother smirks, paying no heed to Celebhîr’s silence. 

“Not to mention he _is_ Lúthien’s great-grandchild, so he’s not half-bad to look at, either.” 

Celebhîr does not care for his mother’s anecdotes about Lord Elrond’s supposed charms. He can scarcely remember the face of the person he inadvertently kissed all those years ago, only his hideous outfit. 

He senses the Theme punishing him again: tenfold retribution for what seemed to be the smallest of transgressions. 

Because of one potential suitor, he is being forced to leave his entire life behind. The fact of another eligible bachelor waiting at journey’s end is little comfort. Celebhîr does not see any reason not to despise Elrond as much as Amroth. 

In fact, it seems there are no good reasons to behave graciously with the Lord of Imladris, and many to do just the opposite. To evade the marriage proposal his mother envisions. 

The less this Elrond can be convinced to love him, the better.

###

**Imladris, S.A. 1753**

“It’s…quite something,” says Rúnen. 

Hinwi, sitting beside them, stifles a laugh. “Sorry,” she swallows. “My Lord.” 

(A comfort and a humiliation, that his mother has recruited some of his former colleagues from Lórinand—his friends—to be his personal guard.) 

Yet Celebhîr smiles as he stands before the mirror. The dress is exquisite, a true Eregion style and yet classic in its silhouette. Its _feminine_ silhouette. 

He knows his mother has issued the dress as a challenge. Celebhîr will not give her the satisfaction of a fight. He has unbound his chest; he will wear the gown out of spite, the same spite contained in the glare with which he has responded to deferential murmurs of _Lady Celebrían_ since arriving at Imladris. His father, in his years as a guest here, has apparently failed to inform anyone of his child’s name.

“They want their silver queen,” he says, from some rotted cavity of his heart. “Tonight they shall have her.”

###

In the morning, when Celebhîr opens one heavy eyelid on his well-appointed guestroom, he sees the spill of pearls and sequins all across the floor, dappled in blush dawn-light.

Through the fug of hangover, he recalls the events of last night. Repulsing Lord Elrond, and being repulsed by him, had been an even simpler matter than anticipated. 

The half-Elf—whatever that means, exactly—had been pretentious and patronizing until finally revealing himself as actively hostile, wounded by a five-hundred-year-old insult to his modesty for which he ought to bear nothing but gratitude. 

The fact that Elrond _is_ strangely beautiful—in a way Celebhîr can’t make sense of, angular yet asymmetric, a wild, dangerous beauty constrained by courtly dress and curt demeanor—makes him all the more of an annoyance. 

Yet if he had succeeded in repulsing Elrond, Celebhîr had also repulsed himself. After leaving Rúnen, he’d stormed back to the room to rend the hateful dress from his body. Besides the scattered bedazzlement, the key evidence lies heaped in the corner: a carnage of silk and brocade. 

Celebhîr gets up. He binds himself; he puts on his real clothes. 

People seem to sleep late in Imladris. The valley’s meandering staircases are mostly empty, save for a few for whom work-hours start early or revelry lasts all night. Someone directs him to the training grounds, which are found at a steep descent into a natural cavern open on a startling view of the canyons below. A rack of wooden practice-swords leans against the damp cave-wall. 

He is slow and stiff from the journey, and from drink. Yet he sings to himself as he runs through an old routine. It has been many weeks since Celebhîr has had sufficient time to sing properly, to restore and center himself. His song resonates into the valley, as his body warms and thrums. At least the air is cool and clear; at least he is alone. 

Until he lunges into a quarter-turn, and his false blade clacks against another. 

His newly materialized opponent is a smirking redhead in practice gear. 

“If it isn’t Lord Amroth!” 

Celebhîr blinks. “Nathriel?” 

The name slips out before he remembers that it is Celebrimbor’s other daughter who remains in residence at Imladris. There is little time to correct the mistake: Nerdawen springs into full-fledged attack. 

“Gone— _thwack!_ —over— _thwackthwack!_ —the Sea. You’re stuck— _thwack!_ —with _me_.” 

“Nice— _thwack!thwack!_ —to see you, too, then.” 

Nerdawen casts down her weapon and levels her fists. 

“No more swords,” she hisses. 

Celebhîr shrugs his to the ground. “Have it your way.” 

The grapple that follows is less reminiscent of any training exercise as it is of their tumultuous groping sessions many centuries ago. With considerably less erotic charge: Nerdawen seems to have a genuine goal of punching Celebhîr in the face. 

After an extended interlude they are both wheezing on the ground. 

“Welcome to Imladris,” says Nerdawen. 

Celebhîr winces. “An interesting reception.” 

“A functional one.” Nerdawen sits, giving him a hand up. “Now that I am cleansed of long-held wrath, owing to the fact that you slept with my sister, I can come to you as your friend of old and ask what has brought you to the humble valley.” 

Celebhîr shakes his head. “It’s too long of a story to get into before breakfast.” 

“That we can fix. So why don’t you start by telling me what I’m supposed to call you, these days?” 

He’s not sure how sincere a question this is, until he turns and sees Nerdawen waiting expectantly.

“Celebhîr.” 

She nods. “Well, then, Celebhîr. Let’s go see if the kitchens are open.” 

And so they put away their swords. 

“Didn’t you become a surgeon?” Celebhîr asks as he gathers his outer robes. “Ought to be more careful, if you're going about trying to break your hands on people’s faces.” 

Nerdawen grins with her gold canines, looking up as she laces her boots. “I happen to be in the personal care of the finest healer east of the Gardens of Lórien. Elrond’s, well, _Elrond_. But he sets bones faster than most leeches soothe bruises.” 

She stands, and dusts off her breeches. “Bit freaky, at times. It’s that touch of Melian he’s got on him.” 

Melian. Celebhîr thinks of his song echoing on the breeze of Imladris, as he follows his strange new ally up the stairs.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few things that weren't explained textually:
> 
>  _Rhaw_ and _fae_ are the Sindarin terms for _hroa_ and _fea_ , the Elven body and soul. 
> 
> An _epesse_ is commonly used nickname or moniker, as opposed to an _amilesse_ , the mother-name. It's always been extremely unclear to me what happened to Quenya naming conventions in the post-Exilic era, so for the purposes of this fic I'm saying that Celebhir[ian] was only given one combo mother/father-name at birth, as sort of sketched out at the beginning of this chapter. 
> 
> And this pretty much was explained textually, but _athnothrim_ is just Sindarin _ath_ (on both sides/across) + _nothrim_ (kindred).
> 
> Relatedly, I didn't learn the Gnomish/proto-Sindarin word gwegwin, literally "man-woman," until I was already halfway through writing this story. It's translated [here](http://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/reference/references/pf/22_words.php) as as [an antiquated term for] intersex, but I feel it is possibly also construable as nonbinary/trans/third-gender. Yet not knowing what Tolkien really meant by the term, and not wanting to do extensive tree-surgery on a fic well in progress, I've chosen to maintain my homebrew concept of "athnothrim" as the main framework for how (binary) trans self-identification might work.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for dead-naming, as well as for mentions of blood and injury (broken nose). 
> 
> It's a Valentine's Weekend two-parter! Since last chapter was so Lengthy™ and Full of Gender Feelings™, splitting up the posting of this more rom-com-esque section between today and tomorrow.

**Imladris, S.A. 1754**

“I don’t understand how she squares it, adoring you and despising me. You’re at least as much of a Fëanorian by influence as I am by blood. If not _more._ ” 

A full tea-service is laid out between them on the bed, its many trays intended to capture the crumbs the semi-clothed High King now flails across Elrond’s sheets. He gestures in exasperation with a scone. 

Elrond, entirely unclothed, drags his finger through the raspberry preserves. “I think she ranks getting kidnapped by Maedhros a lesser offense than being sired by him.” 

“As if either of us had any choice in the matter!” 

Elrond sighs. They have had this conversation too many times to count. Lady Galadriel’s mislike for the King is Age-old sore spot, and Elrond has long served as the conduit between them in political (and more recently, military) negotiation. Galadriel and Celeborn may be realm-less, at present, but their marriage represents the most prominent Noldo-Sinda alliance on the continent. Staying in their good graces is of major strategic interest to Lindon; the key strategy towards the maintenance thereof is preventing Galadriel and Gil-galad from ever being in the same room together. 

For this reason, Elrond hoped the King’s scheduled visit to Imladris would not overlap the Lady’s extended sojourn. Yet Galadriel has yet to declare an end date, and now Ereinion has arrived with his retinue early; flooding on the East Road had not been as dire as anticipated. Elrond has managed to keep him captive with sex and pastry since he showed up last night, but such distractions will only hold so long. Imladris is too small to keep his two most illustrious houseguests from encountering one another indefinitely. 

“I don’t suppose she bore much love for my father, either,” Ereinion says, aggressively buttering a second scone. 

He only ever calls Fingon his father—and even then only in private, for all the annals and tapestries claim him as a son of Orodreth. Maedhros is as uncomfortable a concept to Ereinion as he must be to Galadriel, a part of his parental equation but not a parent. A forebear, a sire, but never a father. 

(Elrond does not tell Ereinion that the older he gets, the more of Maedhros he sees in him.) 

“It seems she was challenged by Fingon,” Elrond says. “Much in the manner she is challenged by her own son.” 

Ereinion chews confusedly at this pronouncement, before his eyes widen in realization. 

“Son?” 

This, of course, necessitates some explanation, beginning with Elrond’s encounter with Lord Amroth long ago in fallen Eregion. 

By the end of the story Ereinion has recovered his good humor. 

“And now she wants you to _marry_ him!” 

“The Lady makes no open declaration of this, but the implication is in her every utterance.” 

Ereinion chuckles. “Ah, how the Theme is wrought.” He throws a grape into his mouth, then another at Elrond, who catches it in his teeth. “Well, why don’t you do it?” 

Elrond swallows. “Do what?” 

“Propose to Lord Celebhîr.” 

“Absolutely not!” 

“What’s the problem? It’s not as if you haven’t been abusing yourself to thoughts of this mysterious _Silver Lord_ for several centuries…” 

“Any lingering eroticism has been undercut by his hideous personality,” Elrond says sharply. 

In the time that has passed since their tempestuous first meeting, they have so far avoided a full reprise. Though Celebhîr himself discloses nothing, Elrond has managed to patch together some of the forces at play in the young lord’s frustrations, a process that began with tactful inquiries to his personal guard and has since extended to informed observation of the fraught dynamic between him and his parents. 

Elrond had been swift to instruct the household staff to excise all mentions of _Celebrían_ from daily use, to replace it with the correct name. He had apologized personally to Celebhîr for the initial misunderstandings, and for his own ungraciousness. 

Yet this apology was received in the same manner as most of his attempts at initiating conversation: with stilted mutterings, a wordless glare, or sudden interest in perusing the evening’s liquor selection. In spite of Galadriel’s ongoing insinuation that they _really_ ought to get to know one another, Elrond has given up on anything but distant observation of Celebhîr as he acclimates to life at Imladris. 

At said distance, however, he remains frustratingly handsome—returning from hunting trips with a young buck slung across his saddle (brow glistening, mud flecking his biceps), or later lounging catlike in the Hall of Fire, once he’s cleaned up, tunic unbuttoned fetchingly to the collarbone. 

Elrond sinks back into the pillows. “Besides, he couldn’t be less interested in the proposition. Or in _me_.” 

Ereinion frowns sympathetically. “You sound disappointed.” 

“I am not. I assure you.” 

The King seems unconvinced by Elrond’s bitter laughter. 

“It could be,” he muses, “that the pursuit of this match is a matter of mutual interest to me and Lady Galadriel.” 

“Ereinion. No.” 

“What? I simply wish to see my dearest person find his bliss.” 

“You will not leverage me for political favor with Galadriel!” Elrond exclaims. “If you’ll recall our arrangement of the past centuries, I’m perfectly capable of doing so on your behalf. _My Liege._ ”

In a tumult that results in only a few dishes breaking against the bedroom’s tiled floor, Ereinion sweeps aside the breakfast arrangement to straddle Elrond in his breeches, pinning his vice-regent’s hands to the pillows. 

(The King is a bit simple, in this regard: in bed, he likes being reminded that he is King.) 

Elrond gives a false show of resistance, as Ereinion shakes his head. Morning sunlight catches the hint of auburn in his dark, unbound hair. 

“And yet, Lord Elrond,” he chides. “Your interpersonal challenges are posing an obstacle to your formidable political prowess. At present.” 

Elrond is very practiced at holding defiance in such scenarios. 

“I will not propose marriage to anyone against his will,” he says measuredly, even as Ereinion above him slowly undoes the laces holding back his half-hard cock. “Even if I did wish it— _which I do not!_ —Celebhîr is, as I said, uninterested.” 

“Celebhîr.” Ereinion repeats the name like an incantation. “I wonder what he would think, seeing you in such a compromising position.” 

“I wonder what I can do to get _you_ to shut up.” 

“Surely you’ll think of someth— _ai_!”

###

The trout are running in the Bruinen. Celebhîr tells Nerdawen he hasn’t been fishing since he lived at Lake Nenuial. Even as a small child, he had known that waiting around for your prey to come to you was infinitely less interesting than pursuing it at great speed.

Nerdawen had shrugged. “Well, then, why don’t we just _say_ we’re going fishing, pilfer a few bottles of the Valley’s finest, and make an afternoon of it?” 

This plan was harder to reject. Yet when they find a suitable bend in the riverbank, tying up the horses to graze in a nearby copse, it becomes apparent that fishing is not, in fact, a pretense for drinking, but for Rúnen and Nerdawen to competitively flirt. 

“I was catching trout with my bare hands when you were a babe in your mother’s arms, little Noldo.” 

“And I assure you that at the time, my mother—who would be the first to say that I am only _half_ a Noldo—was holding me and my sister in one hand and catching fish with the other. Straight out of the surf drowning Beleriand.” 

Hinwi, who has quietly caught more in her net than either of them, stands serene and ankle-deep in the sparkling Bruinen, her silvery-brown braids fluttering on the breeze. She sings to herself softly in Kindi. 

Celebhîr is left to lay out on the stony riverbank and occupy himself with the cordial. 

Unless you are drunk or killing something (cleanly and quickly, not hooking it through the lip and leaving it to a slow death), life at Imladris is exquisitely dull. 

He knows the thought is unkind. Elrond’s refuge is a place for all those wearied by the disasters of the past century—for the survivors of Celebhîr’s own lost home, Eregion, to live in a gentle bliss that must approximate the holy tedium his mother had escaped in Aman. He knows he should be grateful for the rest, for the well-appointed accommodations, the charming company, the subtle paunch he has gained eating three meals a day more substantial than waybread and venison jerky. 

And yet the days blur into one another, without the structure he knew as a border guard in Lórinand. Celebhîr has curried little favor with Elrond that might garner him some sort of appointment to the defense of Imladris. To win Elrond’s favor would be to fall into his mother’s design, to be trapped anew in an unwanted proposal. Celebhîr must see to it that the prospect of this remains unlikely. And so: day upon day of leisure, hunting and tramping, avoiding his parents, flouting Elrond’s hospitality with indifference that keeps the strange, half-Mannish lord distant and brimming with insult. 

All of it amounting to nothing but stasis, another morning waking up to monotonous luxury. 

He has been drinking quite a lot. In general, but also in this particular moment. Two—or is it three?—drained bottles of dangerously honey-sweet liquor are scattered on the stones around him. In a moment of clarity Celebhîr registers the fullness of his bladder, teetering to prop up to his elbows, then hands and knees, as he contrives to remember how to stand. And to remove his breeches. 

“Oi! ‘Bhîr, where’re you off to with no pants?” calls Rúnen, tugging at their trout-line. 

“Mmm. Gotta piss.” 

“Careful, darling—there’s moss on the stones…”

“Can _see_ , Hin. Have eyes.” 

Of course, this reproach is delivered the moment he loses his footing, and falls face-forward into the Bruinen, pantless, with a splash and a sickening crack.

###

Celebhîr comes to with Nerdawen peering in his face, less with concern than with scientific interest.

“Nasty break,” she winces, flashing her gold teeth. “Nothing I can’t straighten up, though.” 

“Nerdawen, if you would kindly stop impeding my examination—he is certainly concussed, and there may be a septal hematoma.” 

Celebhîr realizes he is not on a riverbank, but propped on several pillows in one of Imladris’s characteristically soft beds. And also that his brow is pounding in pain, radiating from a fissure of agony between his eyes. He brings his hand to his nose, wincing, and finds an assortment of bandages; when he looks down at his fingers they are flecked with brownish blood-dust. 

Lord Elrond comes into view, turning Nerdawen aside. “Thank you,” he says pointedly, bringing a warm, scented cloth to Celebhîr’s brow. “When your services are needed, you will be summoned.” 

“Have any sinus trouble, ‘Bhîr?” Nerdawen shoulders her fishing tackle. “We’ll fix while we’re in there. Blessing in disguise, eh?” 

She departs with a wink. 

Silence descends on the examination room, save for the ceaseless twittering of songbirds that accompanies every waking moment of life at Imladris. Celebhîr avoids Elrond’s eyes, and he conveniently reciprocates as he attends to the break. His touch, however, is not avoidant, practiced hands attending to the task with no hesitance. 

At the application of one particular pressure Celebhîr stifles a yelp. 

“Bad, there?” says Elrond. 

When Celebhîr only grunts in reply, he begins singing softly under his breath. 

After a short while Elrond’s song begins to do its work, clearing up the dull pounding in Celebhîr’s brow and the lingering drunkenness. This also results in renewed blood-flow from his nose; carnelian drops land starkly on the white sheets. 

“Tilt back,” Elrond says, although he executes the tilt for him, hands gentle but firm on Celebhîr’s forehead and shoulder. “It should staunch in a few minutes.” 

He washes his bloodied hands in a basin, before handing Celebhîr a fresh towel to hold to his nose. 

Then Elrond turns away again. Celebhîr watches him as he attends to something at the stone counter. It is his first time seeing the Lord of Imladris in such casual dress: dark hair up in a simple knot, a sleeveless green tunic that reveals lithe but muscled arms, narrow brown shoulders. 

Celebhîr had blundered into some version of truth, the night he called him _stunted_. Elrond is small, for an Elf, slightly less than average height for one Beleriand-born, perhaps, but half a head at least shorter than Celebhîr (whose parents, it must be said, are both freakishly tall). And though he is as well-fed and healthy as any in the valley, something about him is still scrawny. Still delicate. 

Celebhîr knows well the legends of Elwing and Eärendil, who had both saved the world and led the Gods to break it beyond recognition. His knowledge about the upbringing of the _Peredhel_ , Elrond and his brother who became King of Men, is more vague, only that they were orphans and Fëanorian thralls before their quarter-majority. The early hardship still seems written on him, yet it does not dull his uncanny beauty. His _frustrating_ beauty. 

Celebhîr still does not understand how the sum of such strange parts can result in so beguiling a form. One among many reasons he has so far contrived not to be left alone with Elrond, in spite of his mother’s designs. 

Elrond turns back to him, holding out a folded paper sachet of herbs for steeping. “You can take these for the swelling. The concussion I’ve drawn out, and there shouldn’t be too much more blood.” 

Celebhîr nods awkwardly as he takes the prescription, mindful of his still-staunching nose. 

“I thought,” he says, towel-muffled, “you saved your energies for more glamorous injuries.” 

To Celebhîr this seems a major threshold: the most words he’s exchanged with Elrond since their confrontation the day he arrived. 

Elrond only shrugs, his face neutral. “It’s been a slow day.” 

Celebhîr nods. “Right.” 

He can imagine another scenario, with another healer, where he might have parlayed such a remark into an opportunity. _Slow day, is it? Might you have time for a more_ personal _examination_? But Celebhîr has a towel on his nose, and river-damp breeches (someone had managed to get them back on him, evidently), and Lord Elrond is not some pretty nurse—it is, in fact, in Celebhîr’s best interest to prevent Elrond from being attracted to him at all costs. 

This scenario is certainly helping the cause. Still holding his face, Celebhîr begins to slide off the bed. Yet Elrond stops him with a gentle hand to his shoulder. 

“One more thing.” 

For a moment, they lock eyes. 

Elrond’s look very much like the shallows of the Bruinen, grey stone beneath clear water. 

But he shuts them, starting up another incantation. 

The song begins to sound familiar. 

It is not quite Celebhîr’s song: the one he uses to hold himself together, that waxes and wanes with him, sometimes working and sometimes confounding. At Imladris it has had to work well; he has purposely avoided the infirmary until now, and not restocked on any herbal treatment. This song is like a counterpoint to the one he sings each morning and each evening, an added syncopation. A harmony. 

Celebhîr goes very still, mesmerized but alarmed. Elrond finishes the song haltingly, seeming to notice this. When it ends he draws back from the bed. 

“I hope that was not an intrusion. I sensed—” 

“It’s fine,” Celebhîr says, taking away the towel. The bleeding has stopped. 

“—I only wanted to restore your equilibrium, after the interference of the other treatment,” Elrond finishes. For a moment then he hesitates, as if about to elaborate further, but seems to hold something back. “If I have overstepped…” 

“You haven’t,” Celebhîr says, though he isn’t sure whether this is really true. 

Elrond bows his head. No further words are exchanged, as Celebhîr gathers his sodden clothes from the windowsill. He is as relieved to step out of the examination room as he imagines Elrond is to see him leave.

###

When Celebhîr returns to the eastern guest-halls, he is perturbed to find his mother sitting out on the terrace.

Anticipating several inquiries as to why his face looks like that—and wondering if his quasi-civility with Elrond might result in progressing toward accommodations separate from his parents—he fails to notice until crossing the footbridge from the main walkway that Galadriel is not alone. 

Her companion is some extremely striking person: square-jawed, dark-haired, skin of pale bronze, eyes of steely blue. A classically handsome Elf who would not look out of place in a tapestry or frieze depicting the fell drama of History, were it not for a summer-robe that verges on immodest, something made of orange and indigo silk that exposes most of a very broad masculine chest. 

Celebhîr looks to his mother, who seems uncharacteristically drawn, her posture very straight, one hand tented on the table as if she has been drumming her fingers. 

Galadriel cocks her head toward her guest, with a thin smile. 

“Celebrían, this is your cousin.” 

This, of course, could mean anything. Yet she clarifies: 

“Ereinion Gil-galad.” Followed by a rushed formality: “High King of the Noldor in Middle-earth.” 

Celebhîr, at this point, is already descending into an inelegant bow. The High King waves his hands. 

“Please, no need. I’m off duty. Besides, you look…unwell.” 

Celebhîr supposes his face should remain elevated, but otherwise has no idea what to say on first meeting your cousin, the High King, when your mother has spent half an Age delegitimizing him and decrying his parentage. His particular parent with whom Celebhîr shares particularities. When the two of them are now taking tea on the terrace, and none of these facts seems fit to be brought to daylight. 

He holds his rumpled clothes to his chest. “Hail, Lord Gil-galad. Um. Well-met…?” 

“And to…you! Well-met to you as well. Well-met indeed, at last.” 

Gil-galad seems to have been on the verge of picking a mode of address for Celebhîr, and yet failed. He flashes a kingly smile to compensate. 

With the afternoon he’s had, Celebhîr does not feel equipped to further engage. He mumbles something about needing to change clothes, and leaves his mother and the High King to their awkward moment—although if he looked backward, he would see the two mightiest of the Noldor in Middle-earth glancing after him in mutual unease, as if they both wish the interruption had gone on longer.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe this is the place to say I have no idea how a broken nose works! 
> 
> Tomorrow, the marriage plot will, at last, be Plotted. Stay tuned!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for dead-naming. 
> 
> Part 2 of Valentine's Weekend Special 🥰

**Imladris, S.A. 1754, a week or so later**

Elrond is relatively pleased with how the scheduling has worked out. Ereinion insists that he need not have a formal reception every time he comes to Imladris. (“It’s practically my summer home! You can’t waste all your best wine every time I’m up for the weekend.”) Meanwhile Celeborn and Galadriel have been engaged most evenings with a company of Sindar who have travelled from Belfalas, making themselves essential to ongoing consultations with Erestor on the construction of a maritime port. 

And so nearly a week has passed without occasion for the King and Galadriel to have the same dinner plans. By now they have surely gotten used to the notion of each other’s presence. Tonight marks the feast of midsummer’s eve; the entire community will be in attendance. Elrond will be able to recognize them both, and there will be more than enough merriment and distraction to defuse any mutual enmity that might surface. 

This necessitates ensuring that the rest of the evening runs smoothly. Politically neutral song selection is of paramount importance. 

Elrond calls a meeting of all the musicians, instructing them to stick to a narrow set list. Something of Finrod for Galadriel, of the Falathrim for Gil-galad, Daeron’s nature-ballads with lesser undercurrents of anti-Noldor sentiment. No Maglor. _No_ rescue from Thangorodrim. 

“Won’t the King want to hear it?” whines a harpist—aware, as most people are without finding the need to mention it, what Maglor’s lay of the rescue from Thangorodrim means to the nominal son of Orodreth. 

Elrond folds his hands against his desk. “Think of this as an opportunity to expand your repertoire.” 

As the minstrels file out of his office, tra-la-la-ing all the while, Erestor slips in. 

“An update on the plumbing,” he says without prelude. 

Erestor’s work has always reflected an expansive definition of _architect_ , but Elrond is starting to wonder if they might consider a title change.

“New wells were commenced this afternoon, but I’m afraid that means no running water in your apartments between now and tomorrow sundown.” 

The choice was doubtlessly made at the expense of Elrond’s large personal array of water fixtures, in order to spare the townhouses adjacent. 

“That’s fine,” he says, reviewing one of several running task-lists on the desk. “Will throw myself in the river.” 

Erestor takes the seat across from him. “Don’t be nervous.” 

From across his papers, Elrond glares. 

“You take far too much of this on yourself,” Erestor scolds. “It’s not your place to hold back three generations of squabbling. Lady Galadriel and the King are the last two Finwëans. They’re doomed to uphold the family drama. Quite literally.”

“I can think of at least two additional descendants of that line, in residence here.” 

“Nerdawen will throw _you_ in the river, if you call her a Finwëan. And I’m not counting you. You’re different.” 

“Which is why I must mediate.” 

“Which is why you should rise above,” Erestor suggests. 

He raps his knuckles on the desk, turning to leave with a whip of his unbound hair. How he keeps the gray streak all in one artful piece, Elrond will never know; the old Elf’s composure has always defied physics.

###

Elrond takes Erestor’s words to heart, as he usually does. He dresses himself for the evening as the Lord of Imladris—not said Lord’s beleaguered attaché, as he still sometimes feels he is. He tries on a new robe of cornflower linen, sumptuous yet lightweight, brought by Ereinion as a gift from their preferred tailor in Lindon. He even puts on a circlet.

Yet these reserves of calm and confidence are depleted as Elrond turns a corner on the winding path down to the great Hall, only to find Ereinion and Galadriel standing together at a balustrade a short distance away.

Facing one another, as if in serious discussion. Or dispute. 

Oh Gods—oh gleaming tits of _Elbereth_ —it’s already happening. 

Elrond rushes to intercede, but suddenly Ereinion is clasping his hand on Galadriel’s shoulder, and then—

Is Lady Galadriel actually _laughing_? 

Elrond inserts himself into this confounding arrangement.

“Hello, you two.” 

There couldn’t possibly be a worse greeting for the two most preeminent Elves still surviving on the continent (no offense meant to Círdan, who would not take any). Yet Elrond is at a bit of a loss, and neither of their Eminences seems to care. 

“Darling!” Ereinion exclaims, appraising Elrond’s dress with an only slightly wolfish gaze. “Look at you. Did I get you that crown? Of course I did. But thank goodness you’re here. My dear aunt was just telling the most hysterical story about Grandfather Angrod.” 

“Really,” says Elrond, trying and failing to sound incredulous on a purely conversational level. “I don’t recall hearing very much of the lighthearted antics of _that_ particular brother of Lady Galadriel.” 

“I’m not repeating it,” Galadriel says, but she smiles. 

“Not until you’ve had a glass of Elrond’s very fine Dorwinion.” 

“Ereinion, you’re a pest.” 

If the use of this intimate name were not enough, Galadriel now turns to Elrond with an extremely unfair accusation. 

“Why _have_ you been keeping me from my darling nephew from me all these years?”

###

Elrond has never seen two people who are so blatantly lying to each other’s faces get along so well. It casts an unsettling air over the entire evening.

All throughout dinner, Galadriel and Ereinion seem captivated by each other’s company, alternating between snickering laughter at various Arafinwëan family anecdotes and spirited agreement on matters of maritime governance. Elrond catches Celeborn’s eye across the banquet table, beseeching him for some insight. Yet Elrond has rarely been able to receive the thoughts of any Elf (save his brother, who was not one, and that had taken significant practice). Even if the old Sinda attempts to share some opinion, it is neatly communicated in the raise of his brow as he serves himself another large glass of wine. 

No matter, for Elrond has stitched together his own hypothesis for the sudden conviviality of the estranged cousins—or great-aunt and nephew, according to their mutual charade. 

His anxious planning of the evening’s musical component plays well into this. When the minstrels strike up old standards of Nargothrond, Ereinion is very convincing in his performance of someone more closely related to Finrod than Fingon. In fact, he seems to be enjoying himself: for one night only, forgetting the fraught politics of his birth. Falathrin balladry drives home the point, songs of the sea-people who had raised up an Arafinwëan king. 

Galadriel’s pleasure at the invocation of the Falas is more forward-looking. She has her new realm in mind, on the southern coast. 

It is clear, after all these years, they have finally found their matter of mutual interest. 

Elrond searches the crowd for Celebhîr throughout the night, finding the Silver Lord outside the fray, as has been his habit. He still keeps to his Kindi associates, or Nerdawen and her students—they were friends of old, after all. Elrond watches him laugh, from across the Hall, lost briefly in memory of that night in Ost-in-Edhil. 

Forgetting himself, for Celebhîr catches him staring. Raises his glass. 

Elrond looks away, hoping he has not shown the crimson of his cheeks. 

After so much practice not speaking to one another, he is not sure what to make of the shift between him and Celebhîr, that afternoon in the infirmary. Nor the new tension that had surfaced when Elrond acknowledged—and amended—the song-cure Celebhîr uses on himself. 

Of course, it wasn’t quite Elrond who had done this. As he tuned to the frequencies of Celebhîr’s body, Melian—the fragment of her entwined with Elrond—had been delighted to encounter what she knew to be a variation on her own work. The song permeated every link between Celebhîr’s _fëa_ and _hröa_. It might have resolved itself of its own accord with the song Elrond used on the broken nose and surrounding complications, if imperfectly. Yet Melian is a creature of care, and working through Elrond, she hadn’t been able to help herself. 

Help himself. Celebhîr hadn’t seemed angry, which was a change of pace, but there was a lingering awkwardness—a bad feeling Elrond has been nursing, that he has violated a boundary. 

Now his anxiety folds into other concerns, for he senses that he and Celebhîr are caught together in a web, this evening. The last remaining Finwëans are hatching a plot.

###

All the parties at Imladris have a tedious sameness to them. The scene in Elrond’s Hall is a tame and provincial approximation of those glittering nights in Ost-in-Edhil, which many in attendance no doubt remember. And perhaps wish to forget: the world is grown more tame, more provincial, since the war.

Tonight, Celebhîr finds he is enjoying himself in spite of it. He has begun to think of his time in the valley as a lull between more interesting phases of life. 

The incident at the river, and in the infirmary, was exquisitely awkward, and yet since the silence was broken between him and Elrond, Celebhîr has felt a kind of relief. Perhaps the constant maintenance of hostility had been draining. Perhaps having Elrond treat him as just another patient had revealed how little a possibility of a marriage proposal there is.

The strange improvised cantrip he had drawn from Celebhîr's song—which had worked, in the end, very well, leaving him without the headache he's occasionally had after healing sessions—seemed to prove that if the Lord of Imladris takes any interest at all in him, it must be as a medical curiosity. 

(This must also explain Elrond’s awkward observations of Celebhîr from across the room, throughout the evening.) 

Meanwhile his mother preoccupies herself with the next move. She is impassioned enough to have, in a matter of days, dissolved her many centuries of disdain for the High King; she is scheming her way into some kind of coastal alliance. Celebhîr is beginning to warm to the idea of the sea—all Elves are _supposed_ to want to go to the sea, aren’t they—and with Galadriel forgetting about his personal affairs for another few centuries. By the time she surfaces to concern herself with the matter, every advantageous marriage prospect on the continent will have paired off. 

And so Celebhîr takes it all in from the margins. Drinking, but not overmuch; not tonight. Listening to the songs. Biding his time. 

Imladris is a lull. His life will start again, eventually. 

Night stretches into dawn. The more experimental musicians delve into abstract compositions. Most of the revelers have already drifted down into the valley in thought, or coupled off in quiet corners to release tensions stoked by the more erotic musical themes, or staggered away to vomit over the balconies. Celebhîr finds himself alone; when he breaks from the trance induced by an extended dirge on four-dimensional geometry, Hinwi is gone (Rúnen and Nerdawen having long ago absconded to their own quiet corner). 

The carnage of scattered and discarded platters from earlier in the festivities has been thoughtfully replaced with selection of breakfast foods. Celebhîr takes a slice of apple cake, eating it with his hands as he walks out onto the terrace. 

And immediately turns around again, catching sight of his mother, the High King, and Elrond, engaged in some tense discussion as the day breaks over the valley behind them. 

“We ask only that you consider it. As you have no parent to intercede, I thought—” 

“Ereinion, that is—I must apologize, again, my lady, for my informality—” 

“There is no need to do so continually.” 

“— _spectacularly_ condescending. To me. And more so to Celebhîr, who the two of you will not even deign to involve in this discussion.” 

Listening behind the terrace’s threshold, Celebhîr tenses at the mention of his name; and even more so when he hears his mother’s iron tone of negotiation. 

“It would be on your part to make the proposal to Celebrían. We submit that to do so would be a manifestation of alliance between our three realms.” 

So she would still use him, for a political pawn. Celebhîr feels the old anger begin to rise in his chest.

But then he hears Elrond laugh in outrage.

(To do so before Galadriel takes a degree of fearlessness Celebhîr did not realize he possessed.)

“We are, evidently, well-allied! As of late! What difference would it make to force your child into an arrangement he has no desire of?” 

“It would bind us,” says Gil-galad quietly. “More than as allies. As family, as we all are; as we have not been for too long.” 

“You are being _maudlin._ ”

“You would have children,” says Galadriel, in a manner that strikes a sudden, eerie chord in Celebhîr’s chest. 

“Because _the King_ will not!” Elrond has come to a full shout. 

Silence follows, and then a staccato burst of footsteps. Elrond passes back through the doorway to the Hall, where Celebhîr stands with his cake frozen halfway to his mouth. 

For a moment they are locked in each other’s stare. Celebhîr wants to say something—though what, he doesn’t know. Would he offer thanks? Apologies? 

But he cannot give away his presence, and Elrond is caught off guard—the rage in his eyes turning to something more complex, grief and confusion, as he nods curtly and rushes away.

###

Celebhîr follows him—at first because he does not feel prepared to encounter his mother, but he soon finds himself tracing Elrond's steps as the Lord of Imladris climbs the the twisting rock-hewn staircases up to his personal apartments. The decision to do so seems to bypass Celebhîr's mind and go straight to his legs, which stutter a little attempting to catch Elrond's swift gait.

“Wait!” Celebhîr calls out. 

For a moment Elrond stops to glance over his shoulder, but quickly returns to his ascent. 

Celebhîr stuffs the remaining cake in his mouth, willing himself not to trip (or choke) as he rushes the stairs three-at-a-time. 

He is panting and covered in powdered sugar by the time he comes to Elrond’s doorstep—this is what he gets for wearing a black tunic. 

Elrond stands with his arms crossed, at a railing that looks out over a tumbling ridge of moss-covered boulders and wildflowers. Half-garden and half wild.

Celebhîr stops a few feet from him, surreptitiously shaking off the crumbs. But Elrond is staring into the distance. 

“You should not have had to hear that. Or rather you should have _been_ there from the start, and gotten to submit your own opinions on the matter.” Elrond’s voice is still drawn with anger, turning now to a mutter. “Or that conversation should never have happened. I’m not sure which.” 

“You know, I wouldn’t mind it,” Celebhîr blurts out. 

His will, somehow, is once again bypassing his mind. 

Elrond looks up in confusion, as Celebhîr’s escalating heartrate reminds him he will now have to explain what, precisely, he meant by this. 

But his mind is catching up to him; it can have as much clockwork as his mother’s, when he has need of it. 

Celebhîr takes in a breath, outlining to Elrond the revelation as swiftly as it forms in his head. 

“If you propose marriage to me, my mother will have no more reason to seek proposals from anyone else. I will be left in peace, which is all I wish for myself; and she will have her alliance, and the King will have…” 

“…the approval he so desperately seeks of her,” Elrond says. He blinks. “Sorry. Please continue.” 

Celebhîr takes another tentative step toward him, in spite of his racing pulse, and half his mind still babbling in doubt. 

“You seem to understand certain things about me. I wonder if you might understand that…a very long engagement, during which I might simply _live_ , continue my life in the manner that has always suited me…may be acceptable. And I wonder if it might be acceptable to you as well.” 

Elrond holds a hand to his chin, looking to be in serious contemplation of some tree. 

“I mean, I know of your arrangement with the King,” Celebhîr says after he gives no reply. 

Perhaps he should not have gone there. Elrond cuts his eyes over. 

“I have _many_ arrangements with the King. Clearly he is attempting to ensnare me in yet another.” 

But he sighs, after a moment. 

“Apologies. My bitterness is not meant for you, Celebhîr.” 

Celebhîr casts his eyes down. “And I think mine was not meant for you, when I came first to Imladris.” 

Elrond looks at him strangely. 

“An indefinite engagement?” he says. 

Celebhîr shrugs. “I suppose that is what I mean.” 

“Isn’t an engagement meant to last only a year?” 

“A short-year or a long-year?” 

“Or a year of the Trees,” Elrond speculates. He shrugs, endearingly, before furrowing his brow again. “But what will your mother say, the more indefinite it goes on to be?” 

“My mother is about to be consumed by a very complex construction project.” Celebhîr grins. “I plan to convince her to forget about me for some centuries.” 

Elrond still seems uneasy, and so Celebhîr softens his voice. 

“I ask you to do this only if you feel it might be to your advantage, as well. I would…propose”—he tries the shape of the word, thinking of how he has experienced this situation in the reverse—“only with your explicit consent.” 

Elrond looks up. “And I with yours.” 

There is a clarity to Elrond’s response that stirs something in Celebhîr; startles him, as if it arises from the same place as his uncanny beauty. Beauty Celebhîr has tried to understand, at a remove; which now confronts him in all its complexity. His eyes in the dawn-light mottled water-grey, sky-gray; his dark ornamental braids half-wild from the long evening. His dark, angled brows, set against olive skin. Narrow-faced, strong featured; what of it Mannish, what Elvish? What, as people say, of Melian? 

Yet Celebhîr is no longer avoiding a proposal; he is avoiding a marriage. He will avoid attraction as well. 

“Then you accept it?” Celebhîr finds himself saying. “My proposal?” 

Elrond seems for a moment as if he might respond with his own questions, but then steadies himself. He nods. 

“Yes,” he says. “I do.”

###

There is a handshake, of all things.

(There is no acknowledgment of the slight shock to the system, coming of that first touch in centuries.) 

Celebhîr’s steps down into the valley are panicky slaps, his mind buzzing in delayed reaction to the gravity of what he’s said, what he has now set in motion. 

Elrond, walking dazedly into his apartments, feels the slight, sticky grit on his fingers. 

He licks one, and tastes sugar.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let the fake dating commence!!!!!!!!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for gender dysphoria. Content warning for misgendering, but not of Celebhîr ~~and also kind of in a fun n flirty way~~. Glancing content warning for implication of sibling incest. 
> 
> For once, *no* content warning for dead-naming. 
> 
> Timeline note that this fic rejects the concept that Numenoreans didn't have a maritime culture until ~600 S.A. or whatever it is, because I want Elrond to have been able to hang out with his brother/meet his family!! 
> 
> Apparently my thing is posting two short chapters and one really long chapter! This has some ponderous sections, and I had to learn a lot more about the mid-to-late-Numenorean dynasties than I previously knew, but for the most part I am just leaning really, really hard on my sweet tooth here.

**Southwest of Edhellond, on the Bay of Belfalas, 2222 S.A.**

Elrond squints into the Sea, fidgeting, as he has throughout the journey, with the unadorned ring on his left index finger. 

So often it goes unnoticed, this silver symbol of promise. Yet Vilya is leagues away, in Erestor’s keeping—the only place Elrond trusts its safeguarding is on a mithril chain around his chief counsellor’s neck, concealed by the high collars of his old-fashioned robes. Better there than with Elrond on the road, though its inactivity leaves the glamours around Imladris faded; the garrison and scouts are well-prepared for contingencies, ever-vigilant even with the scant reports of Orcish activity, the suspicious lull of Mordor. 

Without Vilya on his hand, it is more that Elrond himself feels exposed; disjointed from the place and position that have come to define him. Reduced, for the time being, to the role defined by the other ring. A part he has played admirably for five centuries. 

The wind is high, as is the Sun, the waves whipped into white-hot peaks. What Ereinion calls dreadlock weather: the prevailing style when he was growing up in the old Falas. Better to cultivate your own hair-knots than let Ossë tangle them for you. 

Elrond thinks this may have been how Eärendil kept his hair, but he can’t really remember. 

“Sustenance, m’lord?” 

Langon breaks off a piece of lembas, which Elrond takes thankfully. The other guards are scattered throughout the cliffside cedar grove, drinking from waterskins, each one of them engaging in their own private acknowledgments of the Sea. 

The old Noldo raises a weathered hand to his brow. 

“Think we’ll catch him this time?” 

Elrond swallows the waybread. 

“Wasn’t him I was thinking of, for once.” 

Langon was in Maglor’s service, long ago; he had even been at Amon Ereb when Elrond and Elros were children, by which point he’d long shed whatever proud litany of Quenya epithets he once bore. He had gone on to Eregion, and the guard of the Gwaith. Like not a few of the ancient knights of Imladris, Langon has survived long enough to see some small measure of redemption for deeds done in a darker Age. But there will be no redeeming for the second son of Fëanor, least of all from himself. Rumors of a lonely singer echo five hundred leagues up and down the coast, but if he’s out there, he keeps himself hidden from the eyes of his foster-son. 

“Your pardon, Lord Elrond. No need to summon up a ghost.” 

Langon’s apology is gruff, but sincere. He clasps Elrond on the shoulder, before passing back into the forest. “We should be on our way.” 

Elrond nods. When he is alone again, he sighs a last breath at the crash and spray against the cliffs, thinking also of Elwing—how she had been named for the untranslatable friction between land, sea, and sky. How she named Elros after herself: another translation. 

Scattered, wind-tangled thoughts, uneasily coiling toward some concept of home.

###

A betrothal, even a marriage, need not be beholden to who you are making your home with at any given moment. That very awkward Midsummer’s Day in Imladris, when Celebhîr and Elrond had walked up together to the terrace of the eastern guest-halls—encountering a wide-eyed Celeborn and an inordinately self-satisfied Galadriel—they came bearing shared misunderstandings about the parameters of an Eldarin engagement.

“Oh, it should be at _least_ a year,” Galadriel had interrupted, as Celebhîr put forth the practiced explanation that he and Elrond intended for their engagement to continue through the family’s eventual sojourn to Belfalas. The timeline to marriage was left purposefully obscure. 

Elrond raised his hand at Galadriel’s interjection—nodding a quick apology to Celebhîr, who now glanced between his mother and his intended in bewilderment. 

“By ‘year,’ my Lady, do we refer to a _coranar_ , _yén_ , or Valian year?” 

In the rush of their preparations for this conversation—after Celebhîr chased him to his doorstep and ran away just as quickly, after Elrond screamed into a pillow, regained his composure, tracked down his absconded suitor, and asked him what, exactly, their plan was going to be—he’d barely had the time to make his hair look presentable. There had been no time at all to look up whether the Laws and Customs had ever been amended to adjust for the destruction of the Trees; they certainly never had been for any other reason. 

“A rather academic concern for such a joyous occasion, is it not?” Galadriel smiled indulgently, before turning to her husband. “ _Meleth_ , how long was it between our troth-plighting and its consummation?” 

Celeborn, for once, was giving his full attention to the conversation, in spite of the nest of interesting buntings that had recently taken up residence in one of the neighboring beech-trees. 

“Its legal or its sacred consummation, _melda_?” 

“Oh, Gods, please, _no_ ,” groaned Celebhîr. 

Yet it transpired—without overmuch graphic detail—that his parents, too, had known a long engagement, long stages of which they had spent sundered from one another. Geopolitical strife and the warpath of a tyrant Vala had a hand in its lengthening through the fall Nargothrond and Doriath both; but Celeborn and Galadriel did not seem concerned about Celebhîr and Elrond taking their time in a less tumultuous Age. Nor about their intention to not be in the same place, for the foreseeable future. 

“You will marry when you are ready,” pronounced Galadriel. 

Celeborn really was doing his best not to be distracted by the mating-calls emanating from nearby branches. 

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” he said, with a prim smile for his wife.

###

It is absence that has defined the engagement, though there were a few short years when they were, technically, together at Imladris. Galadriel took her time, courting the Sindar of Belfalas into asking her to rule them, with the word from Lindon being decidedly encouraging on the matter.

Yet the escalation from hostile acquaintances to affianced pair had been a startling one. Elrond had much he could turn to in order to distract himself. Celebhîr seemed content to continue hunting and lounging. By the time he left for the coast with his parents, they still knew shockingly little about one another. 

Elrond has wondered why Celebhîr didn’t consider staying at Imladris, given his oft-strained relationship with Galadriel and Celeborn. He would have been welcome to—but Elrond also could have _said_ he was. Which he didn’t, not explicitly: making the offer might have violated the comfortable distance that, to Celebhîr, seemed to be the point of the engagement itself. And so Elrond had seen them off, uncertain of how a family with such disparate priorities planned to rule in their new and distant realm. 

Of course, Elrond has never had a particularly good handle on how families are supposed to work. 

He and Celebhîr have managed to get to know each other over the years—come, perhaps, to be friends, if friends who are still learning the most mundane facts about one another’s lives. It is no small journey from Belfalas to Imladris, but Celebhîr has made it dutifully as a show to Galadriel, spending a season or so in the valley once every few decades. Elrond prepares the guest-halls for him and his retinue, asks the gamekeepers to groom the hounds and plan itineraries. During these visits they spend time together, but not overmuch. Elrond knows it is a reprieve from Celebhîr’s duty on his mother’s guard, and grants him his space. 

Their social contact follows a set rhythm, through unacknowledged agreement. With Celebhîr’s more recent visits they have fallen into a habit of taking breakfast together. 

One such morning, when Celebhîr was still groggy from unmentioned revelry the previous night, he’d looked on suspiciously while Erestor delivered Elrond some correspondence, narrowing his eyes as the chief counsellor whisked himself back into the corridors of the house. 

“Is he…?” 

Elrond looked up from his paperwork. “Is who? Erestor?” 

Celebhîr returned to his smoked trout on toast. “Forgive me; my mind is addled. I was about to say something profoundly stupid.” 

“If it was any of the more common questions, the answers are: older than the Sun by far; a nephew of Míriel Þerindë, through her younger sister; no, he crossed the Helcaraxë; and he’s flattered, but not interested.” 

“For some reason I was about to ask if _he_ wasn’t really your father,” said Celebhîr. “I don’t know why.” 

Elrond served them both more tea. “Well, then, I wouldn’t have wanted to sound self-important, but I might have asked you how familiar you are with the annals of history. Or perhaps if you’ve looked recently upon the evening star.” He leaned back and sipped, smiling minutely. “Erestor might be touched to hear that opinion, however.” 

“You just seem very like him.” Celebhîr gestured with his knife. “The way I’m like my father.” 

Elrond glanced over his cup. “Are you much like your father?” 

His intended—tall and silver-haired, copper-skinned, in all that like his father, yes, but unkempt, slouching over his plate in last night’s robes—looked up and wiped his mouth. 

“I mean, I wind up doing everything my mother wants me to, in the end.” Celebhîr shrugged, forking off another bite of trout. “Surely that must come from somewhere.” 

Not everything. Galadriel clearly still conceives of Celebhîr as a daughter, in spite of all evidence to the contrary; wields the _amilessë_ she gave her child not so much to make a point as to question whether a point need be made at all. In this quality Celebhîr seems far more like his mother, in Elrond’s observation. 

Yet Celebhîr has no potential in-laws to make these comparisons with. Elrond feels badly at times, that he has fewer such passive insights to offer into his upbringing, that discussion of his childhood is not really a matter of casual conversation, but one of grief and internecine conflict. Celebhîr could do worse than to see the long old-world Noldorin influence of Erestor in what is really the indelible fingerprint of Maglor. 

So they have learned about one another, little by little. Always in daylight. What Celebhîr does with his evenings is his own business, though he seems to honor their arrangement by not taking up with anyone at Imladris—Nerdawen would be the first to let Elrond know. 

Whether there are women he takes up with at Belfalas, Elrond prefers not to dwell on.

###

“You’re telling me,” said Ereinion one winter’s evening in Imladris, deep into a bottle of post-prandial blackberry cordial, “now, you’ve been engaged for…”

The King ran the arithmetic on his fingers. “…eighty-three, four, five, _four-hundred and eighty-six years_ , you’re no less attracted to him than you were during the _thirteenth century_ , and you _still_ have yet to so much as ask him for a simple turn about the trees?” 

“Ereinion, that’s a very loaded euphemism—” 

“—a candlelit dinner? To hold hands solemnly during the hymn to Elbereth? Come off it, Elrond. This just drives me mad. And I’m the one who stands most to benefit from the repression of your ardor!” 

Ereinion had been benefitting. Elrond was granting himself a reprieve this night, after spending most of the King’s solstice holiday in various compromising positions that were beginning to test the limits of his aging half-mortal physiology. 

“I’m not sure how many times I’m going to have to tell you.” Elrond drank sparingly of Ereinion’s latest concoction, which like most projects of the royal distillery had a tendency to dye everything bruise-purple. “The point of our arrangement is not to progress toward marriage.” 

“On whose authority?!” 

“Celebhîr’s. Celebhîr prefers his freedom, which, paradoxically, the engagement you and his mother insisted on seems to have granted him.” He took another tiny sip. “I defer to his preference for freedom.” 

Elrond paused, stirring the dark liquid. 

“Also his preference for women.” 

The King raised his brow as he first served himself, then replenished Elrond’s scarcely depleted cup. 

“I don’t think you’ve been thinking quite expansively enough about the possibilities of gender, darling.”

###

No Elf has ever been as confident in the body, names, and title he was born to, and yet Ereinion Gil-galad has lived a life defined by association with the people called in Sindarin Athnothrim (called in the various Avarin dialects a myriad of terms, designating a myriad of gender experiences; called in Quenya nothing, officially, for Calaquendi custom either denies or obscures their existence). He is aware of the consequences of thinking narrowly around such matters; two and a half millennia on, the clandestine truth of his birth to Fingon and Maedhros continues to constrain his public image.

Yet before he ever confirmed the identity of his true father, Ereinion had created his own clandestine predicament out of an otherwise promising romance with an Athnothrin woman. Laswiniel, his dearest friend from childhood, might today be High Queen of the Noldor had the High King chosen to disregard the laws that would not recognize their marriage bond on the basis of biology. 

But at less than two hundred years of age, with a foundling kingdom and an anxiety to cling to custom after the first calamitous seventy years of his reign, he had instead discreetly engaged the services of an Avarin Athnothrin healer who he hoped might grant Laswiniel the capability to bear a child. 

This was the Lady Tenwi, who played a formative role in Elrond’s own early years at Lindon. When Tenwi came the city and learned of her assignment, she had been wise enough to know such a thing was not possible with a body of flesh, rather than the heavenly raiment from with Melian had once spun her own womb. Though the Queen of Doriath had given the Athnothrim songs to change their outer form, such internal restructuring was beyond the capacity of any of the Firstborn. The whole affair had been frustrating for Laswiniel, who ultimately left Lindon, and the King, because of it. 

Elrond, too, had been troubled when he learned what was happening. The situation had coincided with his own work with Tenwi. She had offered her services in attempt to assist him through the confusions of his mingled Mannish and Elvish blood, their countervailing manifestations in his body and spirit. Such metaphysical prodding at his nature had the inadvertent effect of awakening the lineage of Melian. For one infamous week, the gangly and mild-mannered chief counsellor of Lindon became an eldritch authority of terrifying beauty, vanquishing his paperwork with supernatural speed and grace. 

It was during this interval that the King had misguidedly prevailed on Elrond, as a quasi-Maia, to attempt the ambitious cure Tenwi had not been able to provide to Laswiniel. Elrond, in this destabilized and touched state, did not even know if he was capable of such a thing. Yet he had responded to the request in such wrath that he rendered himself comatose for nearly a month afterward. Though only after nearly smiting Ereinion—not with fiery whip or hammer, but what appeared from the outside to be terrifying quantities of nightingales. 

Here they were, all these years later. Particularly after learning of how he came into the world, Ereinion had entered into a long period of creeping remorse, mortified by how he had problematized Laswiniel’s biology, reduced her to it. She was rightfully angry, having borne such complex humiliations over something that wasn’t actually a problem: when they might have simply had a marriage in all but the most technical of senses, adopted a foundling heir as the King himself had once been. 

Laswiniel came, in time, to forgive Ereinion, but there was no changing the past. She would never return to him. She established herself as one of Círdan’s councilors at Mithlond; she raised her own family there. Ereinion accepted this. He is glad of the life Laswiniel shaped for herself; but he loves her still, will for all his days, and lives with the self-assigned penance to remain forever unwed, and heirless. 

Like most things concerning the King, this penance entangles Elrond, who Ereinion had perhaps unwisely retained in his service. Yet two millennia hence, the former chief counsellor has yet to make another eldritch assassination attempt. Elrond is now vice-regent, un-consenting heir, and very-consenting consort in one convenient package. 

And now, with his engagement to Celebhîr, some kind of proxy for a royal marriage. 

There is no hiding from Ereinion his attraction to Celebhîr; he learned of it long before either of them knew who Celebhîr was. The King’s continued insistence that Elrond act on said attraction is tiresome, but like most things the King insists on—most, though very much not all—it is curled around some grain of wisdom, which Elrond must disentangle and rework in order to integrate into his own worldview. 

And so he had begun reflecting, in the time after Ereinion returned again to Lindon that spring, on the possibilities of gender. 

With his heritage, the greater question throughout Elrond’s life has always been species, for lack of a better term, not to mention order of being. The answer has never been a clear one. Is he a Man when he finds, still on occasion, rogue chin-hairs, or is this a manifestation of advanced Elvishness? 

Elrond has seen glimpses of himself in the future—one of the more questionable gifts of Melian, that she can induce a state of detachment from linear time. The answer seems no clearer in these escapades, though in all fairness Elrond does not often seek out the disorientation they entail, preferring to stay grounded in the present moment. 

Yet he has, in these brief windows, heard the voices of children. 

Would Celebhîr want a wife? 

The extent that Elrond categorizes himself as nér, ellon, Lord, feels tied to way he defines himself in relation to Elros: King, adan, hildor. Brothers: the one word they held in common, by the end. The concept itself of being male he has less attachment to. Yet eschewing any gender marker—as does Alendel, his old flame of the first and second centuries, along with many of their Avarin kin—seems untenable for a Lord of the Eldar, vice-regent of the High King of the Noldor. 

Of course, it is High King beseeching him to consider such things. Yet the High King is still recorded in his own annals as the son of Orodreth. The Laws and Customs of the Eldar have never treated elegantly with the lives of the Athnothrim, with the variance that undermines the sacred duality of marriage. This is the war Celebhîr has been waging his entire life; if Elrond has become his unlikely ally in this, he would continue doing so. Out of loyalty. 

Or perhaps out of love. 

For his own part, Elrond learned long ago there is no particular conclusion to be drawn on any matter of his identity: that his is a state of flux, even if it holds stable at the surface. 

Still, it has been bubbling up, from time to time: the word _wife_. Something he tries under his breath; something he feels, if he lets it, in a shiver under the skin.

###

**The gates of Galadriel’s realm, Belfalas, 2222 S.A. (The present day.)**

Celebhîr rides out to meet the party from Imladris, holding his horse to a measured canter. It is a rare day indeed when Lord Elrond is seen outside the bounds of his valley, but it is a rare day that the King of Númenor seeks else-whither and departs beyond the confines of Eä. 

Begrudgingly, it seemed: according to the hushed reports of their visitors from beyond the Sea, Tar-Atanamir had refused to abdicate to his son through his long decline into senility, relinquishing only in death. This is unprecedented in Númenórean history, as is the scope of Atanamir’s vassalage of the Mannish tribes further to the south—begun by his father, fully metastasized through his two centuries of rule. The proud, ceaseless parades of freighters up and down the coast have attested to this, these past centuries. 

Yet Atanamir had no dealings with Galadriel; no Númenórean King has with the Eldar, not since Tar-Minastir bolstered Gil-galad’s defense against Sauron. It is the Faithful, as they call themselves, who come in their quiet ships, with their polite and chary manner, their archaic Sindarin and newfangled Quenya. How strange that they should associate with Elves on two shores; that solemn, stilted Men should bear news of Celebhîr’s uncles, now returned to life on Eressëa. And bear gifts: Celebhîr had been convinced, briefly, to wear a hair-net of Telerin pearls dedicated by Finrod to his supposed niece, knowing Finrod probably would also have deemed it a perfectly masculine accessory. 

The sentinels blow clear horn-blasts from their posts at the great living gate of honeysuckle and beach plum, and apple trees espaliered in thick braids. It feels not long ago that this latest generation were all saplings. Galadriel extends the trees’ lifespans, using her strange, unspoken-of powers—something to do with the last gift of her cousin Celebrimbor, granted long ago in a stranger time. But fruit trees are more akin to Men than Elves—growing swift, fading quick—and must frequently be replaced. 

Celebhîr slows his gait, bidding the gatekeepers at ease. He comes to a halt as he watches as the riders approaching down the coast road. The Sun catches a bright gleam at the head of the cavalry; for a moment it seems as if a star of heaven has deigned to grace the shores of Middle-earth. 

“Hail, son of Eärendil!” Celebhîr cries out. 

Elrond and his guard circle into the gateway. Celebhîr sees that the glint on his brow is from a single white crystal, mounted to simple band of silver. An understated opulence that will be much to his mother’s taste. Elrond is nothing if not canny about such matters. 

“Hail, son of Celeborn,” Elrond greets Celebhîr in turn. 

They sidle to one another, sharing an ironical look that might indicate the amusement of being identified by these of their respective parents. 

“How fare our Elf-friends?” asks Elrond. 

“Eager for your counsel,” Celebhîr replies. 

Elrond sighs. “Eager for my significance, I suppose.” 

“Ah, but you’re very significant, Lord Elrond.” 

Beneath the jewel, Elrond cuts his glance over—grey and diamond-sharp—before speeding off down the path to the residence and surrounding settlement. Celebhîr spurs his mount to keep up.

###

“Hail and well-met, son of Elwing!”

In her receiving-hall, open for the season onto the air and light of the boundless Sea, Galadriel bends to kiss Elrond’s starry brow, followed by both his cheeks. 

“Gods, but you’re more handsome each time we see you. Is he not?” 

She looks significantly to Celebhîr. 

(A very recent, very minor victory, so minor it may not count at all: it is rare, these past few seasons, that Galadriel speaks any name aloud for him anymore, not in public. Captain of the Coastal Guard serves well in most capacities.) 

“It’s a very fetching crown,” Celebhîr concurs, keeping vague on the matter of Elrond’s handsomeness. 

Galadriel and Celeborn have not seen Elrond in the two-hundred odd years since he last came to the coast, upon the death of Tar-Ciryatan. Celebhîr, over the course of his regular visits to Imladris, has watched the valley’s Lord slip into a greater comfort with his role, a prouder, less harried comportment. And so Elrond takes these many compliments graciously, as they sit down to a small repast, asking after the harvest, second-and-third hand news of Galadriel’s family and their mundane bliss in the West, and of course, the gulls. 

“A merely casual attempt to categorize the gull species of this sub-climate was not rewarded.” Celeborn shakes his head in quiet overwhelm. 

“He’s gone and embarked on a less casual attempt,” Celebhîr says, reaching for the butter to spread on bread-rolls bearing his mother’s sigil, the six-rayed sun.

Indeed his father has—producing monograph after monograph, seemingly for his own private reference, on the infinitesimal differences between outwardly identical varieties of white bird. The forms of the various gulls mimic one another at different stages of life, the juvenile of one species resembling the adult of a different species. Celebhîr has spent hundreds of hours being induced to a state of waking sleep by his Celeborn’s digressions on the subject. Yet his father seems far happier in this work than he ever has been in the throes of military strategy. 

“If you see one that looks as if it might lately have transmogrified from a grandchild of Lúthien, do let her know I’m nearly due north, across the Ered Nimrais and up the Hithaeglir.” 

Elrond says this with nonchalance, taking a bite of seaweed salad. 

No one, not even Galadriel, is ever sure of how to respond to his dark jokes about his heritage. Even Celeborn knows better than to speculate on what sort of gull Elwing became, though the question has doubtlessly crossed his mind. 

Their eminent visitor dabs his mouth, and gracefully continues: “What is expected of me this night, my Lady?” 

Celebhîr watches as his mother puts on her genuine smile. 

“Only that you be yourself, Lord Elrond. Dinner is at nine.”

###

This is what Celebhîr has in Belfalas: a respected position. A functional, working relationship with his mother, for once. Female admirers—many of them—all acclimated to a casual, coastal culture that eschews possessiveness and embraces pleasure for pleasure’s sake.

It is an arrangement enabled by Elrond, and which by definition does not contain him. 

It is working; it has worked for centuries, improbably. Celebhîr can still break into a sweat remembering his proposal on Elrond’s doorstep, in the small hours of the morning all those years ago at Imladris. The panic is vestigial, but still he feels he might get caught. For what? There is still no impending expectation of marriage; he is learning the bounds of his mother’s patience. Or perhaps her indifference, now that Celebhîr has done his part to secure the alliance of the remaining Noldo realms of Middle-earth, none of which is really all that Noldo: Lindon to the north, Belfalas to the south, Imladris to the east. 

Nor does it seem that there is an expectation of love. According to the archaic codes of law by which such things are still governed, this is the only reason the Eldar are supposed to marry (so long as said love presupposes the biological arrangement required for procreation, naturally). Celebhîr had not wanted to talk to his mother about this, and so engaged Celeborn on the topic, through some digressive tactic that began with a question about sandpiper nests. 

“I’m no scholar of legal Quenya, _fileg_. But I think ‘marrying for love’ can be expansively understood, can it not? There is love of a lover, but there is also love of one’s family, and concern that they be well-positioned. Most marriages are borne out of the latter, as you are finding.” 

Celebhîr dug a pebble from the sand. “Which was yours borne of?” he asked. 

“The former,” Celeborn said, with his trademark squint into the sun; some waterbird was dodging and diving in the waves. “A less stable arrangement.” 

Celebhîr didn’t have to ask what he meant by this. Sometimes Galadriel loves her husband more; sometimes less, depending on where else her passions lie at a given moment. It is Celeborn’s more constant love that keeps them both grounded. 

His father is right: with Elrond there is stability. But this is only insofar as Elrond stays at a distance. 

And the closer Celebhîr is to his intended, the less stable anything seems. 

Celebhîr is not sure when it began to happen, that the intellectual exercise of observing Elrond’s form—attempting to parse his ineffable _strangeness_ —slipped its bounds and started traveling considerably southward. That he began to rise—to bring himself to staggering, mouthwatering conclusion—to thoughts of his prospective husband. 

_Husband._ The word feels preposterous. Celebhîr has bedded an ellon, here and there— _ellon_ as an inadequate shorthand for _the ones born with cocks_ and who are happy to be so endowed, who don’t have to equip themselves or engage hypothetically on matters of size and girth. He has never understood his body in relation to these men; he has left such encounters feeling indifferent at best, dismal at worst. With women Celebhîr makes sense, feels in control of himself—and more often than not of the women he takes to bed: supple-limbed archers who delight under the command of their Captain, cool-eyed ladies of court pleased to curry favor with their young lord. 

Yet in proximity to Elrond, Celebhîr ceases to make sense at all. By the end of his last visit to Imladris he had been driven mad by the image of Elrond eating a poached pear with a tiny, serrated spoon. (They only ever see one another at breakfast.)

Celebhîr had to take to the woods for a week after, slaying a brace of pheasants and a near-mythic wild boar in his quest to stop thinking about that damnable spoon. How it had been slowly and carefully licked. 

He hates playing into his mother’s expectations, her games and insinuations. Celebhîr chafes, feeling himself pulled into the arrangement laid down by the Laws and Customs: the one that results in children, that replicates the pattern. Truly, does the broken world need more descendants of Finwë, when so many have already wrought their destructions? Gil-galad seems wise enough to understand this, in his own abstinence from reproduction. 

There’s the other thing: though the High King was an advocate for the engagement and its political import, it seems an unspoken understanding that, in body, Elrond will remain committed to Gil-galad alone. 

And so Celebhîr’s arrangement remains perfectly stable.

###

It is a stability earned and strengthened through moments of trial. Elrond will not stay long in Belfalas, preferring not to be kept from Imladris any longer than necessary. A handful of days, each of them dense with grave conclaves on the state of Númenor, most of which Celebhîr is not even authorized to attend; it will be over in a flash. Elrond will go home. Celebhîr will remain untroubled for another few decades.

In the meantime, he just has to get through dinner. 

The silver engagement band on his left hand is so long-worn that it seems a part of his skin. Yet it carries unusual weight, as Celebhîr puts on his grey and black formal robes, ties his hair into the staid plaits befitting his military rank. He misses leaving it loose and full, as he did in Ost-in-Edhil; he’s had to start instructing the barbers to thin the layers, tame away the starbursting rivulets. 

Celebhîr walks at a brisk clip to feast-halls, anticipating their Númenórean guests will not be conversant in the Elvish tradition of the fashionably late arrival. 

Haranil and Savintur, the two leaders of the mission, are indeed mingling solemnly amongst only their Mannish companions. The musicians are still in the languorous process of scene-setting, somewhere in the corner; the invisible hands of Elvish hospitality have at least proffered drinks. 

Haranil hails him (gravely) as the son of Celeborn. 

(Even if either of his parents were there to annotate this, Celebhîr suspects they wouldn’t; thank Gods for Men, and their shortened contexts; for time, which has at last worn his identity to familiarity.) 

“Are you finding your accommodations suitable, my Lords?” Celebhîr asks on his approach. 

“More suitable by far than a seven-weeks’ sea-berth,” says Savintur, who is the less serious of the pair. 

The conversation turns to the journey, and the course of anticipated return: they will go northward via Lindon, to pay respects to the High King. It goes unspoken that Belfalas is the more strategic phase of the visit, given its proximity to the Atanamir’s colonies, and the long observations of Galadriel’s spies. 

Gradually the room fills with the more prompt Elves. They are the councilors and courtiers, Celebhîr’s guards who are not on-duty for the evening: all who have the most investment in the regime-change and its outlook for those who remain loyal to the Eldar. The rest of the population will crowd in once the party really gets started, and Gods know when his parents will deign to arrive. 

It is curious, however, that Elrond is not yet there; though the reception is given for the Elf-friends, everyone knows who the true guest of honor is. 

Celebhîr keeps glancing to the entryway, scanning the hall for the glint of the star. Yet Elrond makes no hint of his presence known, not until Celebhîr is nodding through an extended analysis of the policy agenda being advanced by the Lords of Andúnië and suddenly feels a light brush against his arm. 

Haranil pauses in his speech, lowering dark-ringed eyes as if to bow. 

“My Lady, ah…?” 

He looks to Celebhîr for an introduction, the same moment Celebhîr looks to his side and sees Elrond. 

The awkward moment dilates. Celebhîr knows he must act quickly, say something of the Man’s mistake. Yet he, too, is bewildered, by the sight of Elrond in a gown that begins with a choker of fine glass beads about the neck and resumes again only at the upper arm. The two attributes are sundered by Elrond’s bare shoulders and collarbone, or perhaps connected by some invisible mesh, for there are small gems scattered across his skin like stars. 

That are very intentionally meant to be stars, of course: at the joint of Elrond’s clavicle they form the shape of the Valacirca, and below the left shoulder the Telumendil descends into the curve of the breast. 

For the gown _accentuates_ , subtly but distinctly. It must have a corset. (It takes all of Celebhîr’s self-discipline not to rest his hand on Elrond’s lower back, to seek out the mechanism.) And it is the color of the sea on a calm day, its hue shifting under the flickering lanterns like the play of sunlight on water. 

Then there is the matter of Elrond’s hair, which is bound back only by a single braid at the right temple, left to descend in inky waves down his sparkling shoulders. 

Celebhîr swallows back thoughts of Lúthien weaving her power—how her raiment had been as dark, as rich—still at a loss for words as Elrond steps forward. He seems unfazed by Haranil’s misunderstanding, bowing with his bright star on his brow. 

“Hail, _Elendili_ , who have traveled far to reaffirm the love and friendship my brother bore for me.” Elrond speaks the greeting in Quenya, then slips effortlessly into the quaint Sindarin of Celebhîr’s youth, matching the register of the Númenóreans. “You and your company have my gratitude, Lord Haranil, considering my journey was by far the more convenient one.” 

Haranil looks for a moment as if he might seek else-whither right there in front of everybody, his craggy, sea-weathered face going nearly green as he drops to his knees. 

“My Lord Elrond, brother of Tar-Minyatur who sprang from the font of Eärendil, star of the evening and morning, seeker of the Gods—I beseech you, I was sorely mistaken, I…” 

Elrond quiets the Man with a touch to the shoulder. “Rise, son of Cirandur. It is not me to whom your obeisance is due, though I may resemble him. There is nothing to be forgiven. Our customs have been long sundered.” 

His kind smile, as Haranil comes again to his full height, smooths over every lingering inelegance; the Man seems even more at ease than he was before the transgression. 

Gently, Elrond removes his hand, now quirking his brow in sympathy at the penitent Númenórean. 

“I do not envy your people, having to learn anew the strange ways of the Elves each generation. I myself am still in the midst of a long study.” 

At this he looks to Celebhîr, grey eyes glimmering under dark lashes. 

“Captain, would not the Lady deem such a blessed meeting an occasion to sample this season’s vintage?” 

The request is punctuated with a casual touch to his forearm, and a frisson that Celebhîr feels even beneath his ceremonial gauntlet. 

Now more than ever, he needs a drink. The Lady of Belfalas is not here to preside, having likely only gotten to the first third of her braidwork. It is his prerogative, as the first and only son of the house, to break out the good stuff. 

Celebhîr beckons over the steward, an excuse to slip away from the silken contact. 

“Naturally, Lord Elrond.”

###

All night he watches Elrond work the room. The Elf-friends are anxious, their desire for peace and emulation of Valinor at odds with the mistrust they bear against their own kindred who cleave to the covetous Kings. Yet Elrond’s very presence seems to soothe them, with the contradiction and unity he manifests. This is a mere prelude to the council he will provide over the coming days. Knowing Elrond, it has been annotated to provide for every contingency, cross-referenced against all situational precedents known to the annals of history, and edited to an economy and clarity of language that will make the receivers feel as if the wisdom has sprung unbidden from their own minds.

Celebhîr keeps his distance, throughout the meal and the music afterward—including a dance-pantomime of the lay of the Mariner that Elrond seems to bear with polite amusement. During the penultimate stanza Celebhîr slips out with Rúnen onto the west-facing terrace, where dark waves murmur against the sea-cliffs below. 

“So?” says Rúnen, after they’ve each taken a few pulls from a flask of stinging Avarin liquor. 

“So what?” says Celebhîr. 

His friend nods back toward the brightly lit feast-hall. 

“You intended, my Lord, is making quite an impression.” 

Celebhîr scoffs. The Men may have been assured that their misgivings about Elrond’s manner of dress were a result of cultural differences, but every Elf in attendance has taken notice of what is, in fact, a most unconventional style. 

Rúnen shakes their head at the Sea. “That valley is a very strange place.” 

“So they say.” 

Celebhîr glances up to find the source of the voice: Elrond standing silhouetted before them, as murmured applause emanates from the hall behind. He approaches the balustrade with a graceful slink of his long gown, while Celebhîr looks pleadingly to Rúnen, who only smiles and pockets the flask. 

“Good night, my Lords.” 

And then Celebhîr is alone under starlight with Elrond, who is his own vault of stars. 

He straightens his posture. 

“You look well this night.”

This is an attempt to sound neutral, but Celebhîr comes off a little strangled. 

Elrond, by contrast, relaxes into a lean, his neck raised long above glimmering bare shoulders, his hair angled into the darkness. 

“This old thing? It was a gift of my niece Tindómiel. She knew how much I admired her wedding dress, so she had one made for me. In a different color, of course.” 

“Ah.” 

Celebhîr is grateful for the cover of night, as heat rushes his face. 

“I never have any occasion to wear such things, so I thought who better than for the Elf-friends? They might have recognized its companion-piece from one of their museums. Though perhaps not this crowd.” 

Elrond sighs, glancing up to Celebhîr. 

“You look nice, too.” 

“Thank you,” Celebhîr manages. 

For a moment he meets his intended’s open gaze. Elrond’s look is casual, no more portentous than any exchanged over breakfast at Imladris. Yet Celebhîr has never beheld him by starlight, never see his lips parted in shadow. 

For the first time in five hundred years, Celebhîr senses what might be an invitation. 

He is on the verge of saying something more, something he cannot predict: rash, reckless words that will form out of the swarm of sensation overwhelming his mind, palpable in the surge of blood that rushes his temples. 

But something else stops him: an older, deeper sense. He hears his mother’s steps crossing the floor on the far side the hall. His glance darts upward: she is observing them from a distance, and with approval. 

In an instant Galadriel passes out of view, but it is enough time for Celebhîr to find himself, and step away. 

“Your pardon, Lord Elrond, but I must receive reports of the night watch.” He nods, communicating, perhaps, a deeper apology with a nervous glance he can no longer contain. “I wish you the best, though, in your councils with the Elf-friends.” 

“Of course.” Elrond defers, and matches his formality. “And thank you, Lord Celebhîr. I shall take your well-wishes to heart.” 

If there is a passing sadness in his tone, he remains as kind as he was with the flustered Númenórean.

###

Celebhîr takes to bed two of the musicians, that night after the report from the watch. Improbably raven-haired Sinda girls who are partners on the idiophone: one plays the low notes, the other the high. They are certainly not twins; Celebhîr reckoned with the realism of that particular fantasy many years ago.

Yet as these women fold over him like dark wings, he retreats—guiltily, deliciously—into a dream of a doubled Elrond, two bodies making sense of paradoxes it seems impossible for only one to contain.

###

He cannot resolve this in his mother’s realm. Celebhîr turns to his work for the remaining days of the council; there is enough to be concerned with, having so many dignitaries convened in one place, and the King’s Men have their own spies.

So he contrives not to see Elrond again until the moment of his departure. That morning, Celebhîr strides toward him with nervy resolve as Elrond negotiates with the groom over his horse’s tack, reminding himself to breathe as he waits out a discussion of saddle weighting. 

As soon as he is able to, Celebhîr makes his announcement without prelude, keeping his hands held stiffly behind his back. 

“I would join you again at Imladris, sooner than anticipated.” 

Elrond is done with his performance. His dress has been subdued to worn travelling armor, far from the finery he wore when he rode in. His star must be secreted in some jewel-case; he wears only an unadorned circlet. He half-smiles at Celebhîr’s declaration, lowering his eyes as he fixes the straps on one of his packs. 

“My Lord is most welcome to Imladris, at any time he pleases.” 

Celebhîr bites back his own smile, maintaining formality as Elrond mounts his steed. 

“I will send word, when I am next able to take extended leave.” 

Elrond looks down from the horse. 

“Will you?” 

It is the last word they exchange. Yet the echo of his faint mockery lingers on the air, the tease thrumming in Celebhîr’s blood as Elrond and his company gather their dust and diminish eastward.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Totally putting on the speculation cap re: any dealings of the Faithful and Galadriel in Belfalas. People who know more about Numenor please @ me!! 
> 
> Other things left textually unexplained: 
> 
> Elros and Elwing both mean star-spray/foam. 
> 
> Meleth means “beloved” in Sindarin; Melda is the same in Quenya. Thought it would be cute to have Celeborn and Galadriel swap languages for pet names. (It’s been a long time since Thingol’s ban, OK, Celeborn is just a Wife Guy and would literally never speak Quenya for any other reason.) 
> 
> Ever since I found out that “seeking else-whither” is the Elvish [euphemism of choice](https://i-am-a-lonely-visitor.tumblr.com/post/643479140842029056/ok-which-fucking-elf-came-up-with-seeking) for _mortal death_ , I have not gotten over how ridiculous that is, and I will continue to insert it in fic wherever possible. 
> 
> The thing about a casual attempt at gull identification going unrewarded is a possibly verbatim quote from Sibley's Bird Guide, shoutout to all my birders!
> 
> Elendili - Elf-friends


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for deadnaming/misgendering. 
> 
> This chapter is basically too ridiculous to exist on its own, and another more substantive update is coming Friday/Saturday, but just in case you forgot this is a romance novel, here's some real romance novel content!!!!!!

**Galadriel’s court at Belfalas, 2227 S.A.**

“A word, Captain?” 

At the briefing’s conclusion, Celebhîr’s senior guards heed the signal of their Lady, filing efficiently from the council chamber. The Captain is left to face his mother. 

Galadriel stands from her pearlescent chair at the head of the long table, pacing away from her various dossiers to stand at the west-facing window. She closes her eyes, taking a deep intake of the salt breeze. 

The longer she lives the more she is prone to such public displays of private contemplation. Celebhîr stands at quiet attention until his mother turns her bright gaze on him. 

At last Galadriel speaks: “We find ourselves in a time of relative peace.” 

“The reports from the southern border remain somewhat concerning,” Celebhîr counters. 

“The reports from the southern border will remain concerning all our days at Belfalas.” 

Like many things Galadriel says, it is unclear whether this is foresight or rhetoric. Celebhîr has reached a stage of life where he chooses to wait for her to elaborate, rather than react in immediate ire. 

Indeed, after a moment, his mother sighs. 

“We have the power to hold our realm; beyond that, I cannot expect myself to wield control. Tar-Ancalimon is well-established in his reign, and it is clear he will not relinquish the expansionist policies of his forebears.” 

“My Lady,” Celebhîr begins, deferential but terse. (Would that they had this conversational framework long ago, as Lady and Captain, rather than mother and child.) “Some of these colonial governors would annex all the lands of Aman, if given the chance. Their most-adjacent Elvish realm seems a fair consolation.” 

“They fear me,” Galadriel says flatly. “And fear me they shall, until I encounter a neighbor with a more friendly disposition.” She shakes her head. “No, I do not think they will not cross our borders.” 

The rumors of the Elvish witch on the coast are disseminated widely, borne out of agitprop cooked up by Galadriel’s own agents, spontaneous rumor among superstitious Men, and the simple truth, which is that Galadriel holds strange powers and weaves them over her lands. (If it quacks like a duck, and so forth.) 

“Anyway.” She drums her fingers on the windowsill. Celebhîr watches her countenance shift from that of a liege to that of a mother, braces himself for the conversational turn. 

“What I wished to discuss was your upcoming leave of absence.” 

Celebhîr has, of course, divulged no such plans to the Lady of Belfalas, nor to any of her staff. He straightens. 

“I don’t believe I know what you mean.” 

Galadriel smiles. “Our strategic concerns are lessened; you have able surrogates willing to temporarily relieve you of your duties. It is an advantageous time for you to go to Imladris, is it not?” 

He is never sure of how well he is shielding his mind from his mother. Galadriel claims she will not probe without consent or great necessity, but she maintains an expansive definition of both. Yet Celebhîr is his mother’s child, and though his _ósanwë_ is a blunter instrument, he is long-practiced in placing up walls of stubbornness. 

Surely, if Galadriel sees how he has been thinking of Elrond—and he _has_ been thinking of Elrond, in ways he would not wish to cross his mother’s transom—she wouldn’t raise the subject in so casual a manner. This is only her age-old impulse to remind him of his long engagement, surfacing for lack of better distractions. 

“Elrond would be glad of it, I think. He says you had not much chance to catch up when he came to the coast.” 

One among many extant discomforts of the engagement is the fact that Elrond and his mother still write to one another somewhat regularly—a private conduit that precedes Celebhîr’s existence, if not by much. 

But Celebhîr holds back his discomfort. “Elrond has much else to concern himself with.” 

“Does he, though? These have been gentle years, Celebrían.” 

Galadriel has now fully slipped into mother-voice. Chiding. The _amilessë_ comes, as always, as a dull irritant, even when reserved for private use. She pays no heed to his slight grimace, as she steps back to her not-quite-throne. 

“By his own account he is rather engrossed in a lengthy treatise on the old Mannish tongues. Linguistic reconstruction is not a pursuit taken up ahead of greater concerns. At least not for Elrond.” 

His mother’s playful tone does nothing to encourage Celebhîr to respond in kind. He maintains his stance as Captain of the Coastal Guard, as Galadriel folds her hands on her subtly glittering lap. 

“You have served me well these past years, and it seems we are past the first instabilities of the Númenórean transition. There may yet be stranger times ahead of us, but in the meantime, I am asking you to consider a vacation. Which I wonder if you haven’t been considering yourself.” 

_Wonder_ , she says. Celebhîr supposes there are other means of guessing at a child’s heart, even if one is not actively scrying the contours of his thought. Half relieved and half irritated, he purposefully refuses her pointed, glimmering eye contact. 

(And renews, internally, his vow not to conform to her prognostications; her expectations.) 

“I thank my Lady for her suggestions. May I be dismissed?” 

“You may.” 

Celebhîr bows, turns, and leaves without looking back—even as Galadriel cries after him, the echo resonating down the hall for the door-wardens to politely ignore: 

“And come for dinner soon! Your father misses you.”

###

_Firith 41, 2227 S.A._

Lord Elrond, 

I had mentioned when you were last here an earlier sojourn to Imladris than anticipated, perhaps sometime in the coming years. I regret to inform you now that this will not be the case. Strategic concerns pertaining to the Númenórean colonies to the south will keep me occupied over the next several decades. I am ever grateful for your hospitality and anticipate taking advantage of it again within the yén, or so, but after discussion with the Lady of the realm I have determined that the delay, for now, is unavoidable.

Since I have never been practiced at letter-writing, I am afraid this missive will be a brief one. Yet thinking I should provide some other value, for the cost of post, I enclose a few sketches of pottery shards found on our coastline, as well as a few from the area surrounding the Ringló delta to the north. Some seem to have traces of runes; they are not intelligible to me, knowing only the standardized Cirth, but nor were they to my father, who has a far broader grasp of modes predating Daeron. Knowing your interest in ancient linguistics I wonder if you might provide insight or commentary, though only if you would appreciate the diversion.

Yours, intended, 

Celebhîr Galadrion Celebornion  
Telpeher Altárion Telepornion

###

_~~Ethuil 3, 2232~~ ~~Echuir 14, 2240~~ Iavas 54, 2249 S.A._

Lord Celebhîr, 

Please take the long* lapse between your letter and this response not as an expression of offense, but one of sympathy for your own need to delay your visit, of which I am most understanding. I must apologize on behalf of my brother for the more troublesome of his descendants, which I think he would appreciate me doing. Elros’s hope was always that his children would not begrudge him their chance at another kind of life. The Men of the latter half of this age have grown forthright, on how they would see the bounds of such life expanded: more space, more time, more of everything.

Given your mother once wished for two out of three, and she has lived long years in the fulfillment of that desire and its consequences, I do think she presents a formidable defense. Yet you, my Lord, are of course equally formidable, and indispensable. I bid you fulfill your duty; and do not worry about me, for I am quite practiced in waiting.

Your sketches were very interesting! I did indeed appreciate the diversion, which granted me long perusal of materials I forgot I had here, and a few I did not know had ever made it to Imladris in the first place. I wondered at first if the shards are not of either very early Ossiriandic tribes, which might explain their presence on your shores, or of later remnants who avoided the dark hunter and Doriath both, remaining in the East well into our “First” Age. 

(How inadequate a term that is for those who lived countless generations ere the frightful rising of the Sun; I’ve found most Sindas and certainly Avari find it offensive, and endeavor to use older calendars in discussion with them. How relative is Time itself, for our sundered peoples! I wonder how your father feels about the subject, although I’m certain whatever opinion he might offer would be diplomatic, at least at the surface.)

Yet I could not decipher the glyphs either—they do seem more pictographic than letter-form, as runes—even after long consultation of every lexicon I have on hand. I would not put forward a hypothesis as to cultural origins without having the slightest linguistic hint. 

As it happens, the person I know with the longest roots in Beleriand-of-old is staying here at the moment: my Lady Tenwi, a Kindi of a very ancient family who was later a handmaiden to Queen Melian—I hope, for many reasons, you may someday have the chance to meet her. And I aim to get her eyes on your drawings, in case they spark anything of the familiar. Unfortunately she is occupied at present by a long silent meditation on the westward cliff-side, which I am loathe to interrupt. In some years, perhaps, I will have the opportunity to prevail upon her insights. 

For now we are left with the mystery! Yet I appreciate the assignment, and wonder if I might not offer you one in return. Another reason for this letter’s delay: I am having a portrait done—I know, a bit ridiculous, but the High King sent an artist of his patronage to stay for a season, which has since stretched into several. We’re having a terrible time deciding what I ought to wear. Would it trouble you very much to suggest your preference between the lilac and the aventurine? I enclose two of her oil sketches for reference, which you of course may keep, and put to whatever use you see fit (including kindling) once you feel sufficiently informed. 

(Perhaps being informed in and of itself is a use; I do feel the depictions capture me at my best, and I am very rare to say so.) 

Yours, intended,

Elrond (Elwingion, Eärendilion, [redacted]) Peredhel  
Elerondo Pereldar (must we, with the Quenya? I’ve always hated the look of this.)

*Final postscript, after which this letter is even more delayed than it was upon commencement: Tenwi walked up the path to my apartments this morning, feeling greatly refreshed in spirit, and thanks you for the first laugh she’s had in six cycles of the Sun. I might have guessed your shards were of containers used for some sort of bodily ablution, but she has indeed confirmed they are chamber pots of a type she remembers using when visiting cousins ere the laying of the Girdle. (I will not include here the precise terminology she employed.) We shall make note in our archaeological records.

###

_Rhîw 33, 2251 S.A._

Lord Elrond, 

My thanks for your belated insights. I now must address the troubling implications of your update re: portraiture.*

(*I think this serves better as a marginal note than a postscript: If the tone of what follows is distasteful, or not of interest, you may disregard/use for kindling/forget it ever happened, etc. Same applies to enclosed package, although for details you must read on.)

It may be that the High King tolerates his consort getting in states of shocking undress with strange artists—clearly, in fact, he encourages it. I cannot pull rank on his personal claim to you, but as the one who bears your ring of promise I will not stand for the sordid attentions of this painter. If she has not fucked you, Elrond, she may as well have with her brushstrokes, which are so keen, particularly, on the contour of the lips and curve of the hip. I do not believe anyone in history** has so delicately attended to the nuanced shadings of a flushed nipple (and in such miniature as well—the woman is clearly talented). 

Will I find you thus ruined on our wedding night, bound to another out of careless lust? Be careful, my intended, lest your wantonness leave you spoiled for me. Many may want you; yet remember well that only one has laid a claim.***

There is a penance you might do for me. Accompanying this letter is a curious garment sent by my uncle on Eressëa, via our Elf-friends. He seems to still think he has a nubile young(-ish) niece on the shores of Middle-earth who might be in need of such things; no one has yet informed him that this woman does not exist, but in the meantime his misunderstandings are to our advantage. I was not able to determine where the pearls are supposed to go, and where the gold mesh, but you are after all renowned for wisdom. I trust you will be able to figure it out.

You will wear this Telerin curiosity as a second skin: beneath your daily attire, and when in a private state of undress. Yet you are not to be seen wearing it before any other—should your King (or certainly any of his artists) prevail upon you. The sight of you in this delicate adornment is reserved for your intended, and him alone; you will wear it and think of him—and only him, should such thoughts move you to take matters in your capable hands.

Your intended expects a prompt response, detailing your reflections on this proposal. Regrettably, however, he will not be available to bear witness in person for another yén at least. 

(If I may now break character, you have already received reports of what keeps me at Belfalas, via other and less salacious channels: of our new and uneasy alliance with our southern neighbors, our cause for vigilance. 

You have your own vigil to keep; I wish you ease of it, and have attempted here to provide easement after my own fashion. If I have judged wrongly in these overtures you may, as I have said, disregard. However, if I have correctly read between your lines, I trust you will have no cause to.) 

Celebhîr 

P.S.: I see now that in my previous attempts at letter-writing I simply lacked a clear motivation. The question of your portrait dress has more than provided one. Oh, and I prefer the aventurine, but you are very comely in both—and given how little fabric seems to be implied, I don’t quite see how it makes a difference…?

**Or if they have, it has been lost to history, beneath the waves; I have the sense certain of my relatives, and perhaps some of yours, were similarly given to erotic portraiture.

***And I wonder if it that claim was not laid with a kiss I wish I could better recall, long before our silver rings were forged.

###

_Ethuil 27, 2252 S.A._

Lord Celebhîr, 

I received your last letter and thoughtful gift with great interest. I wonder, however, at your hedgings and qualifications, seeming to imply uncertainty of my obedience to my Lord intended. 

Do you think I take the promise of our rings lightly? If it has only lately dawned on you that our engagement might someday come to be of a nature other than platonic, know that this has been my desire from the beginning. I am very patient, as I have said. (I think this comes of having learned at a steep curve how time works in the Elvish world, rather than being blessed from birth with an innate sense.) For long years, if I may be tender, I dared not even hope my affections were returned—affections that do date to a kiss I remember well and frequently, in fallen Ost-in-Edhil.

Yet lest I make the ink run with my teardrops, let me move along to my reflections on your proposal. To which first of all, yes, I enthusiastically submit. Did you think I would receive such a request with anything but the utmost seriousness? I am not bound to you, but promised: a bond is a foregone conclusion, but a promise is a living, active thing, which must be exercised in order to live. Here you have given me ample opportunity to demonstrate my promise and quality—especially re: your observations of my wantonness*, which so disturbed me that it took several attempts (and one long bath) before I could move on to read the rest of your letter. 

And so I wear your gift even as I write, and will, save for under circumstances dictated, until you join me at Imladris and I can show off to you in person. I wear it well, if I may be so bold; contrary to your reports, I found the garment to be quite intuitive—though perhaps this is owing to my familiarity with the High King’s intimate wardrobe. (I refer here to professional familiarity, of course.) I must have the build of a Teleri maiden, for the fit is good, excepting a few places where it is (albeit pleasingly) tight.

I remain (arrayed for you, my intended),

E.

P.S.: If you think any of this is said in jest, know that I have in my employ the most capable and discreet launderers on this side of the Sea, having stolen them from ~~Ereinion~~ the High King. (Their loyalty to me, as the long-time arbiter of textile-based disasters, their defender and champion, was stronger than to the Crown.) They have already devised a method for the regular cleansing of gold mesh. 

P.P.S.: I hope I have conveyed well the ease you provide me; I am in need of it. The ill winds that you must have far earlier sensed in the South now reach us in the North. None of our patrols have yet encountered these shadows in the form of Men—still, it seems our brief peace now turns to a long uneasiness. If I sometimes wish I could perceive the future more clearly, I more often wish I perceived it poorly, or not at all. Mine is a muddied, irregular foresight—it discomfits me, and I prefer, at most times, to set it aside. Yet in any case our enemy’s designs confound foresight. Even your mother’s, I think.

*And if you really were concerned about the painter, please know that if she was (as you say), “[having her way with me] with her brushstrokes,” it is Nerdawen who has been having her. We three make a fine time-delayed love triangle, do we not?

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I feel like I keep using this without explaining it: yén is the (Quenya, I guess) term for "long-year," a.k.a. 144 solar years. Anyway will Elrond wear chain mail lingerie for the next 144 years??? tune in next time to find out. 
> 
> Firith, Ethuil, Rhiw, Laer, etc are all Sindarin seasons (/months, kind of). 
> 
> Also Celebhir and Elrond's ominous allusions toward the end are to the appearance of the Nazgul ca. 2250 S.A., but, like, chain mail lingerie, so how bad can it really be. The second age, folks. It's long!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warning for gender dysphoria. Also note that I have switched the rating from mature to explicit** 🤪
> 
> This is also the first longer appearance of an OC from the previous fic in this series; Alendel has been referenced at various points and I think the text will tell you most of what you need to know, other than that Alendel is a Sindarinized version of what I'm construing as their Avarin/Kindi name, Endi. (All of this is 1000% made up, by me; if you know more about Avarin dialects please @ me.)

**Imladris, 2401 S.A. Once again, breakfast.**

“He sounds like a prat,” says Alendel. “But you have a thing for prats, then, don’t you?” 

Elrond lays down his teacup. “And do you include yourself in that generalization, Endi?” 

Alendel glares acidly from across the table, the expression at odds with the gentle cooing and dandling of the child in their arms. 

Less than a year of the Sun, in age, and Minyi has already travelled across the Hithaeglir—during the traversable late summer, but still. Elrond had considerable anxieties when Alendel, Hawin, and Ezuli wrote to say they were making the crossing with their children from their settlement in Eryn Galen. Yet four of those children are woodland scouts of ten yéns and more—Minyi represents a third generation, the first-born of their oldest daughter, Aelwin—and as Endi is quick to remind him, their parents are all Avari who survived Age-ending cataclysms knit by Gods not their own. 

(“What do you mean when you say _your gods_?” Elrond had asked, more than two thousand years ago. “Aren’t the Valar yours, as well, only they go by different names?” 

At which Alendel had looked at him very much the same way they are now, before expounding on the Maiar who roamed the twilight before Melian ensnared Elu Thingol. When Elrond heard their names, he felt a ghost of familiarity.) 

The wood-Elf picks their retort. “I am aware I was your last opportunity at a healthy relationship, but to bear a grudge after this long…really, Elrond, it’s unbecoming.” 

Elrond rolls his eyes at this, but then Alendel kisses their grandchild’s head in punctuation, which does undermine his irritation. Minyi curls up sleepily against their sloped chest, small fists and ears fidgeting toward the possibility of a squall. 

Alendel bounces the baby, looking now to the other end of the table, where breakfast has been largely displaced by an abundance of blueprints. 

“Erestor, tell me: what is your impression of Lord Celebhîr?” 

The chief counsellor has one long hand splayed to prop up his forehead; the other dangles a pencil. Erestor is returning to his architectural roots, and is deep in the planning stages of a new outdoor amphitheater. He does not look up as he offers his opinion. 

“It was not, at first, a positive one.” 

“And has that evolved, since he entrapped dear Elrond in a lengthy and loveless engagement?” 

“It’s not loveless,” says Elrond, but more quietly than he means to. 

Erestor removes his reading-glasses, of fine Dwarven make; it’s been at least three hundred years since he was embarrassed to be seen in them. 

“It _may_ not be _lust_ -less.” 

“Erestor!” 

“Love does require more togetherness than the two of you seem to be capable of. At least at the first.” 

The amendment is a private punchline to a joke nobody would make about his late husband. As with most matters of emotional import, Erestor is probably right; whatever sense of love Elrond has been gleaning from much-handled letters, from private gifts—he _is_ going to have to put that thing on at some point, isn’t he—has yet to be manifest in person. In the flesh; in the _joining_ of flesh. 

Oh, Elbereth, and all her milky tits, he’s _nervous_. 

But Elrond settles back to his tea. Composed. 

“Lord Celebhîr and I have been unfortunately sundered by circumstance, lately, and…well, yes, _throughout_ the engagement. Which is why it is good he is coming!” He allows himself a subtle pout. “Both of you could stand to be a touch more reassuring.” 

Alendel babbles at Minyi in pseudo-Kindi—Elrond catches _chipmunk_ , among mostly nonsense syllables—before looking up coolly. 

“If it means you’ll stop hanging off your King, then perhaps I am reassured.” 

They, too, were once in the employ of Gil-galad, as his civilian chief of staff in the aftermath of the War of Wrath, an improbable alliance between a wary Avarin refugee and a Noldo king eager to demonstrate pan-Elven unity. Indeed, too improbable to function: Alendel had taken great offense at his handling of matters with Laswiniel. Aside from their long skepticism of the biologically deterministic strictures of the Eldarin Laws and Customs, Lady Tenwi is their aunt, an honorable, eminent, and ancient Elf. It was Alendel who arranged for her to come to Lindon; seeing her treated as some back-alley leech was an insult from which their personal relationship with the King has never recovered. The professional relationship had continued for some tense years after, during which Elrond had significantly honed his mediation skills. 

As a regent of the last Noldorin kingdom Elrond continues to mediate. Mostly what this means is choosing his words wisely. Which he does now, buttering a scone with great nonchalance: 

“Endi, you know very well that it is the High King who hangs off of _me_.” 

Alendel smiles at this; even Erestor does. But then the baby starts screaming in earnest, and the only words being chosen at all are fragments each of Kindi, Quenya, and Sindarin, vaguely pertaining to hunger, plump cheeks, and twinkling stars.

###

“You know how loudly you walk, Sinda?”

In the pine-glades west of Imladris, Celebhîr finds himself turning to an Elf who cannot be very much older than three hundred years. The brat mock-lopes beside him with a daring grin. 

“Stop it, Fen,” murmurs his older sibling—in Kindi, which Celebhîr keeps trying to speak, only to be answered in Sindarin. After a long afternoon with no game in sight, he has given up on anything but walking in silence. 

The mocking one sticks out his tongue, yet the rest of the clan—nine of them, on this hunting excursion—seems content to ignore him. Much as they are to ignore Celebhîr, who can’t keep any of their names straight, who couldn’t convince Hinwi to come with him. (“What?” she’d said. “Because we’re all wood-Elves we’ll have something to talk about?”) 

Why had he bid Rúnen stay in Belfalas, Rúnen with whom he’d prevailed against a thousand wily bucks? Because Rúnen knows the defense parameters of the coastal realm better than anyone but Celebhîr himself; Galadriel could not spare them both at once. 

Celebhîr pushes aside the thought of just how happy his mother had been to spare him. The visit is a practical one, he has maintained to her. It is more than due time that Belfalas and Imladris reconvene on matters of strategic surveillance, now that the Elf-friends have established their haven at Pelargir. There have, thankfully, been no hostilities against Galadriel’s realm since the Enemy’s new servants began to walk the lands, nor against Elrond’s. Yet the Enemy is now fixing his eye on the dominion of Men, pushing ever further to his doorstep. The relative peace of the Elven lands belies the long uneasiness surrounding them. Comparing notes on a yén’s-worth of intelligence from the South and North is a critical priority. 

This is why Celebhîr expected to spend more time in council— _private_ council—with the Lord of Imladris, and less trying to win over said Lord’s ex-lover’s children.

###

And Celebhîr has never been around so many children at once. There are not a few at Belfalas, but they are either solitaries, as he was, or pairs of reasonably spaced siblings. A narrow concept of family, compared to this boisterous clan, ranging from adults who are parents themselves to youths teetering on either side of majority. After a few days’ observation of the family, he has gleaned that they come from the settlements near his uncle-cousin Oropher’s lands, that the younger of the siblings were born to Hawin and Ezuli, and the older to Ezuli and Alendel.

Celebhîr had not known Alendel was going to be here—had not known who Alendel _was_ , in fact—until the moment of his arrival at Imladris. There, beside Elrond rushing toward him ( _Elrond,_ in some diaphanous saffron robe, with blue stones sparkling on his ears, with a hint, perhaps, of gold winking at his open collar) was a pale, unfamiliar Elf in green and gray, short and full-bodied, eyes narrowed and ears drawn back. 

Elrond had smiled, after the awkward handclasp, and the stuttering uncertainty before he and Celebhîr embraced one another—the brief contact so potent that it was mutually broken off after a few seconds. 

“Oh, and this is Alendel, my—” 

“His ex-lover,” Alendel completed, seeing no need for allusive phrasing. They stepped forward, scrutinizing. “We have much to discuss, you and I.” 

“Well-met to you as well,” Celebhîr said as he dismounted. “And do we?” 

Yet already he felt himself falling in line. In that moment, everything Celebhîr considers to be his more sexually intimidating qualities—his height, his hair, his ability to retain a rugged handsomeness after long errantry in wild lands—had quailed before the scrutiny of this compact, voluptuous Elf, with the enviable, silver-sheened chestnut tresses of certain Avari. (Many Sindas go to great length to achieve the mere shadow of this effect, with less-than-wholesome treatments.) 

Alendel’s familiarity with Elrond—and Elrond’s deference to them—was not the dynamic Celebhîr had hoped would define his first visit to his intended in a long-year. Elrond, easily sensing this, had laughed something about serendipity, and everyone wanting to come to Imladris in the fall. 

Yet Celebhîr is quick to wonder whether the test is an intentional one, on his intended’s part. 

If so, impressing Alendel and their family is the main task he seems afforded to set his mind to. Elrond is scarce the first several days after he arrives at Imladris. Celebhîr is learning, as he has failed to on past visits to the valley, just how overbooked is its Lord’s schedule. 

“Tonight I will be yours entirely,” Elrond finally announced this morning, at the end of a too-brief breakfast. 

This was spoken casually, as he reviewed his day’s agenda. And yet the way he implied the opening in his calendar was so _very_ reminiscent of the allusive quality of his letters—the swelling insinuations of his surprisingly scrawly tengwar. 

It had taken all of Celebhîr’s restraint not to grab Elrond by the embroidered lapels, to drag him off to some dark corner of his library and into their first kiss since the thirteenth century. 

Instead he’d nodded, leveling his eyes to meet Elrond’s, pale-grey in the morning light. This was a confrontation of the slight, bitten-lipped hesitation with which his intended has avoided his gaze, so far since his arrival. 

“I am at your disposal, Lord Elrond.” 

At this Elrond had smiled and slipped his hand into his undone collar—thumbing out a strand of pearls. 

He’d recovered decorum just as quickly, after achieving the intended effect; had stood, given Celebhîr a chaste kiss on his blazing cheek, and promptly left, off to go follow the lengthily sub-bulleted task list of the Lord of Imladris.

###

So this is what occupies Celebhîr’s thoughts, as the afternoon still ahead of him pulls itself to unforeseen lengths, drawn by trailing red sunlight through the shadows of trees. The evening and its unfulfilled promise feel more remote with each careful tread onto scattered pine-needles. (When was the last time he was made to feel self-conscious about his _footsteps_?)

Suddenly one of the Avari holds up her hand—the older daughter, mother to the little child who is currently the valley’s adored center of gravity (and with reason). 

At her signal the siblings all assume some rote formation: which is to say, disappear into the surrounding trees. 

As a practiced woodland scout in his own right, Celebhîr is able to locate a few of them on first glance. Yet finding the rest is complicated by the sudden presence of a huge, shaggy, grey-brown bear. 

The beast snarls in his face, so close that the rancid breath makes his eyes swim. 

Self-consciousness and daydreams have dulled him indeed.

###

“Heard you sang off a bear.”

Alendel strides up as Celebhîr is shrugging off his gear on the colonnade. The guest-halls are occupied to a far higher capacity than he is accustomed; he has been beaten—badly—to the shared baths. 

Celebhîr tugs at his boot, crouched on the tiled walkway. 

“I was a border guard of Lórinand.” 

“Ah. Elrond does keep talking that up about you.” 

They come to lean against the balustrade, observing Celebhîr’s labors. 

“Do you need a hand with that?” 

“No,” Celebhîr grunts, as he finally wedges his heel out. “But thank you.” 

Alendel takes this as their overture to a new subject. 

“Curious arrangement you two have.” 

So this is the long-anticipated interrogation. Celebhîr squints up.

“It is, a little.” 

“I didn’t think it was yours to deem curious,” Alendel continues, crossing their arms. “Given it was your design in the first place.” 

Celebhîr comes to his feet again, smacking dust off his breeches; to think he’d sweat them through on the walk back, when now their lingering dampness absorbs the chill rolling in with sundown. Imladris has real seasons, unlike Belfalas, where the climate is relatively mild, and Celebhîr suspects his mother limits what little weather there is to practical and aesthetic purposes. 

“I approached Elrond with a strange design, yes. Strangely, he agreed to it.” 

He senses there is no hope in an offensive stance against Alendel; he may as well explain himself as plainly as he can. 

“I was…younger, and altogether repulsed by the marriage prospects my parents had in mind for me. When I learned a little more about Elrond, he seemed…” 

Alendel squints. “…the least repulsive?” 

“Yes.” This is not going well. “I mean, no, of course not—I meant he seemed understanding.” 

“He is. Far too much for his own good.” 

Celebhîr’s mind is stammering close to outrage, after the long, hot, afternoon, the _bear_ , for Godssakes, pulling a half-remembered song out of his—

But he takes in a long breath, finding with it a more strategic response. 

“Why didn’t _you_ marry him, then?” 

Alendel’s eyes are of a green darker than his own, green like the tangled understory. Celebhîr expects their gaze to harden at the question. Instead, they turn out to look upon the light dwindling over the valley. 

“Our tongue has no equivalent for your word ‘marriage.’” 

Celebhîr knows this well; had asked the question half in jest. Not all Avari are non-monogamous, in the arrangements through which they beget children. But nothing constrains them from it, and many choose to be over the course of long lifetimes. The grave and interminable covenant of the Eldar, born of the so-called sacred act and its proscribed arrangement of genitals, is at best an object of ridicule to them; at worst, it is a great offense to their sensibilities. 

Rúnen has offered Celebhîr many colorful speculations on the subject over the years. Does your Elbereth numb you at the groin, if you covet a sword already claimed by a wombèd sheath? Could it be that all the prohibitions are simply divine intervention, acting against the creation of more Eldas? 

Celebhîr is more than aware of how ridiculous it all is. This is precisely why he has avoided an Eldarin marriage for the past two thousand years. And why he will continue to, regardless the most recent persuasions of longing, of what might come to pass this anticipated evening. Though his interest in Elrond has evolved over the course of the engagement, his wariness of the particular sacred act and its genital configuration remains constant, for several coexistent reasons. 

He stands, coming to Alendel’s side at the balustrade. 

“I don’t think there was a word for what Elrond is, until someone came up with _peredhel_.” Whoever that was—the now-proud epithet could equally have originated in Dior Eluchíl ascribing it to himself, or with the first gossipy Iathrim who had taken sight of him. “And he seems to do well with…indefinable arrangements. You might have had one together.” 

Alendel lets out a wry laugh. 

“We might have, in another life.” Their face sobers again. “But this is what I mean to warn you of, Lord Celebhîr. Elrond’s love is rather…singular. Not quite compatible with my own concept. Even if you Eldas had no such tiresome customs, I do not think he would have been able to share such a love with others. Or divide and apportion it to multiple people.” 

Celebhîr leans back. “He’s been bedding the King all these years we’ve been engaged.” 

“ _That_ arrangement is purely of the body,” Alendel says, with marked irritation. 

Then they pause for a moment, awkwardness crossing their eyes. 

“I think—I know, rather—that when Elrond is really _in_ love, it is different.” 

“As it must be for anyone, who finds the loves of their _fae_ ,” says Celebhîr, grateful he remembers the plural. 

“It is beyond the interplay of souls.” Alendel shakes their head. “Or rather that he’s got—well, you know—another part to his soul. That you and I do not, and which is capable of a most singular kind of devotion.” 

They sigh, turning to face him. 

“What should have asked is: have you met _her_ yet?” 

Celebhîr’s mind goes airless a moment. He is thinking of Elrond in the regalia of a Númenórean princess, the unmentionable adornment of a Teleri maiden. 

_Her_. Has he? 

Alendel takes his silence for an answer. 

“If you haven’t, you will.” They clap him on the back. “Just keep your head about you. Remember, Elu was mired in Nan Elmoth among the nightingales half an Age before he came up for air. You’ll do just fine, though.” 

They step away with a wink, turning back down the corridor—off to reprimand some combination of children who are attempting to climb down into the rock-gardens. 

Among his scattered outerwear, Celebhîr is left to refine his speculations of what the evening holds.

###

“I know it’s a little ridiculous, but it was Erestor’s idea.”

Holding his hands very steady, Elrond pours them each another splash of the young Dorwinion, one of the last bottles from the year prior—really better served cold, yet there are greater concerns at hand. The silken weight of the gold and pearls against his skin, for one; and Celebhîr across from him, looking as if he can see it all through Elrond’s red damask robes. 

Valiantly, he avoids spillage, settling the bottle again beside the flickering candelabra. 

“I’m told a bedchamber for each season was a basic amenity in tree-time Tirion. Although I’m sure their seasons were milder. Are.” 

They are sitting on the balcony adjoining his summer bedchamber, which is open to the air, linen curtains demarcating its boundary with the gardens. As the nights have cooled, over the past weeks, he’s had most of the furniture removed. It is a ritual that always leaves Elrond a little wistful. He likes sleeping outside. He supposes he could all year, if he set Vilya to it, but pushing too far against the valley’s natural climate seems a frivolous waste of power—though Elrond has been known to take the edge off a winter storm, or tame a heat wave’s humidity, if only for the sake of everyone’s hair. 

(But he wills himself not to fiddle with the sapphire ring, knowing it might reveal itself in agitation; focuses, instead, on the silver.) 

“All this to yourself?” Celebhîr glances over his glass—an unfair smirk on his cool green eyes, given what Elrond knows of his parents’ respective, cavernous apartments. 

Humor is good, though; it smooths their conversation, keeps them from too quickly acknowledging that this is the first libation they ever have shared after nightfall. 

“Well,” Elrond counters, “the High King has about fourteen bedrooms at Lindon.” 

These were constructed, perhaps, in anticipation of the next generation of Noldorin royalty. They are now slept in on a rotating basis, providing a change of scenery for the King to wake up surrounded by updates on tax policy. Now that he is long-established at Imladris, Elrond keeps encouraging Ereinion to branch out into his legions of admirers, but he knows it is a losing battle against the slog of court. 

Celebhîr leans back. “ _I_ only have one.” 

“How very sensible.” 

His intended shrugs his brows. Elrond has seen Celebhîr hold excellent posture, as Captain of his mother’s guard; his natural state, however, seems to be this rakish slouch, his great height stooped into a careless, liquid bent. Yet there is a tension, tonight, to the disaffection, which is at odds with the formality of his dress: a tunic of shot blue-black silk, with gold buttons done all the way up the sleeves and throat. 

Shadowed in the candlelight, his symmetrical handsomeness is made all the more fetching by a nose-bridge still crooked from his fall all those years ago. His hair is only lightly braided off his face; yet even unbound and tumbling down his shoulders, tonight Celebhîr’s silvery coils seem somehow restrained. 

Elrond takes another drink, calming the silvery feeling in his own chest—amplified by the intricate lattice against his skin. 

“I suppose I’ll have to pick one eventually. Get them all weatherproofed, for year-round occupancy.” 

Celebhîr angles his head. “Whatever for?” 

“Oh, well, when—” 

Yet Elrond catches himself, his lapse. There is an uncertain shape he perceives, of a family taking root in the halls he now occupies alone. Voices he has heard—far more rarely, silhouettes of faces. He does not like to do this to himself: contemplating the possibility that there may again be born into the world a creature like him—like Elros—is too painful when it still seems so uncertain. 

He lowers his eyes, swirling the liquid in his glass. Changes the subject. 

“Which bedchamber would you most like to see the inside of?” 

Celebhîr smiles now, gaze flashing; emeralds catching light. Refusing Elrond’s shyness. 

“Which is prepared?” 

“I prepare for all contingencies, my Lord.” Elrond swallows his wine. “Except the summer room, which hasn’t a bed. At the moment.” 

“Then I’ll have to come back in summer.” 

They are both stalling. 

Now that they are finally here, Elrond realizes he’d hoped Celebhîr would make the first advance. This is Celebhîr’s arrangement, after all, and has been from the beginning. Elrond has only ever been a willing participant. 

And yet beneath Celebhîr’s self-satisfied slouch, the curl of his lip, is his own shyness. He needs hints and openings. Elrond has provided them, at times shamelessly, but tonight he cannot retreat within a glittering crowd, nor behind the strokes of tengwar. 

Tonight, there will be no more concealments. 

And so Elrond stands, and comes forward, bringing his hands to the front-clasps of his robe. 

Celebhîr looks up, half-smiling. “Or are you implying we need no bedchamber?” 

Elrond’s fingers hesitate at his collarbone—face lowered, pulse fluttering in his throat. 

“Does my Lord wish to appraise me?” 

“He does.” 

There is a barely noticeable tremor—an urgency—in Celebhîr’s response, in spite of heavy-lidded eyes, confident, parted lips, the pose of one who is accustomed to such surrender, such conquest. Elrond watches his breath hitch, as he parts the robe and lowers it from his shoulders, and comes to his intended, half-hard and shivering in the night air. The supple gold mesh is cool and tight against his cock, the strands of pearls descending from the golden collar like rivulets of meltwater over his chest and shoulders. 

Celebhîr has never touched Elrond like this, never past the neck, past the shirtsleeves. And yet he is always touching him. He has been since he laid his claim a thousand years ago and more. 

Now he brings his hands to Elrond’s hips, and they share a soft gasp—involuntary, exultant. 

Celebhîr runs firm hands up Elrond’s sides, grinning as he braids his fingers through the filigree. 

“Have you truly been arrayed for me thus, this past long-year?” he murmurs. 

Elrond writhes into the embrace, letting his robes fall entirely. 

“More or less.” 

If Celebhîr has any objections to the _less_ , they are not vocalized. He pulls Elrond down to straddle his lap—the rough insistence of Celebhîr’s arms and the restriction of his cock so intoxicating that Elrond already feels dangerously close. He steadies himself, trying to think of how he might sustain this, _survive_ it, as Celebhîr brings the pad of a thumb to his lips, the tenderest place he has yet touched. 

“I wonder what will happen if I kiss you,” says Celebhîr. 

The question is genuine. Elrond sees it in Celebhîr’s eyes, the ember of awe, of incomprehension. He realizes what he has been doing unconsciously, in the delirious overwhelm of the body: sending tendrils to probe the edges of his intended’s mind, with the gentle, loving curiosity of a creature of spirit—of _ëalar_ —so eager to know how love is inscribed in flesh. 

Elrond acknowledges her. He must concentrate, weave her presence into his own curiosity, his vulnerability—something to keep her grounded in him. That’s it. A small, inner song, a little like a prayer. 

As is what he says next: an invocation.

###

“Would you like to find out?”

Celebhîr nods his assent. He can find no breath for any other response, with Elrond above him whispering the invitation, skin flushed and dripping with adornment, and his swollen cock nested against Celebhîr’s own, beneath the partition of silk and gold. Both of them achingly hard already—and though Celebhîr cannot show it as prettily, he feels, for once, at peace with this. The touch of Elrond’s mind is already taking him to a place beyond his body, already coiling into limbs that might take flight, that feel charged by supernatural grace. 

Yet the body is the source, each new shift in their positioning creating small sparks of rapture. When their lips finally part for each other, it is exaltation. 

Undoing. 

A sudden loss of reference, the world unwoven, rewritten. Reordered: Celebhîr is on the shores of Nenuial, inhaling the loamy half-rotted scent of the shallows. Bare skin against soft grass, cool earth beneath, someone whose name he can scarcely remember. Yet there is no Elf-maid beside him. Elrond curls into the edges of the memory, smiles through the wind in the reeds, the distant calls of loons, the idle, perfect angle of the Sun, how she always should be, basking the world in summer. 

_This is where you were._

_Yes_ , Celebhîr answers, more clearly than he ever has to the mind of another. _Yes, and be here with me._

And Elrond is, has a body again, though it is seamless with all the green surrounding them, the hiss of cicadas, the sharp whiff of lightening gathering on the lake’s far shore. They kiss, and the shadows lengthen; time falls away like Celebhîr was warned. The clouds shift, mottling the light into piercing shards. Rain descends, softly, then the storm—

—they surface, Elrond broken away from him, panting, eyes blown nearly black. His bare arms are all gooseflesh; it is night again, and cool. Yet the Moon is higher, though it has only felt like moments, and the candles half-puddled on the table. 

Celebhîr knows the word, knows the lineage, has been told what to expect. (There was no way to know what to expect.) Still, he finds the question forming on his lips. 

“What are you?” 

And then Elrond is burrowing into the joint of his neck, and very real, unbound hair _everywhere_ , prickling Celebhîr’s skin, and this is somehow more overwhelming than anything Celebhîr has just experienced. 

“I’m never sure,” Elrond says, breath hot and whispered against his ear.

###

They make it to a bed. Which bed, which season, is inconsequential; there is a fire going, and a half dozen too many throw pillows all swept immediately to the floor.

Celebhîr curses himself for ever sending the damnable Telerin lingerie. When it is finally divested of, into a jangling pile, Elrond is waiting for him, disheveled and flushed, cock darkened against his belly, hard as he has been for…hours? Days? 

The patience he claims to have learned from the Elvish world is perhaps better attributed to inhabiting his own strange time, part Elvish, part…elsewise. 

Now Celebhîr has fallen in after him. Slipping from anchorage to anchorage: stripping to his breeches and chest-binding (color-coordinated in fawn; he laughs remembering how nervously he’d dressed), scrabbling at hasty directives about oil. That mission abandoned, when he is lost, again, in kisses that take him now into shadowed forests, now into their roots in underground rivers, blooming up again into lichen, velvety mushrooms, the coinlike eyes of nocturnal beasts, indifferent. They are but two woodland creatures, with life teeming around them: batwings, birdwings beating above. Should he cry _Tinúviel!_? 

_No. Absolutely not, anything but that._

Elrond—it is _Elrond_ who bites his neck through the reprimand, speaking now very much aloud: 

“Touch me or I will die.” 

A very grave thing to say, for one who might choose mortality at any moment of his life.

Celebhîr reaches at last for the vial on the nightstand, wrests Elrond from his side to his back, against the pillows, parts his legs. 

“Like this?” he murmurs in answer to his intended’s demand, the keening sound with which Elrond replies providing all Celebhîr needs to go forward, lubricating his fingers and painting the entrance, pushing in with one—a soft moan—two, three fingers. 

It is a dizzying thing, to fuck someone so real—so _delicate_ , Celebhîr thinks, for how brief are the lives of Men, how quickly they can be felled by a wound, a fever, and what knife’s-edge keeps Elrond from this fate?—and yet at once so numinous. For there are moments as Elrond cries in pleasure that they slip back into that otherworld, the images less differentiated the closer he gets, until it is all light and color. And _music_ , Celebhîr realizes. _His_ song, the song that holds him, that Elrond once heard in him and sang back slightly altered. And yet now harmonized with a movement far greater: _the_ movement, the Theme, the world. 

It is a rightness, a joy, that makes Celebhîr laugh, that moves him to praiseful rambling— _so_ good _for me, beautiful like this, how I’ve dreamed of you, my dark-winged one_ —when his manner with so many bedmates has been coarse, dependent on the shameful flush, the press of a bruise. 

Another time, Celebhîr thinks, breath hitching, for he has evidence Elrond might take well to such things. Yet here, now, he submits himself to adulation. One hand curled into his intended, writhing and rapt, the other toying at his stiff-swollen cock, Celebhîr is overwhelmed by the depths of his own arousal. 

It is not jealous, or spiteful, or any of the twisted feelings he has had at times, laying with others; times when he has not been fully beheld. All he can feel now is his own hard cock’s sympathetic desperation against the friction of his breeches. 

How little might it take to send Celebhîr spilling, only from stroking Elrond’s cock and fucking him? 

The strokes come harder, faster, Elrond perfect beneath him, writhing into each sinuous twist of Celebhîr’s fingers. And Celebhîr knows, finally, what has long eluded him: that within the ancient music of the world, Elrond’s strangeness is a strand of the Theme in state of constant fluctuation, that yearns for counterpoint, call and response, improvisation, to be undone, to be answered. That within these shifts he longs to be defined, and yet to hold multiple definitions. 

Now Celebhîr gives him another. 

“You’re _mine_ ,” he says, meaning to sound commanding, but it comes out in a tone of wonder, of astonishment. “All mine, aren’t you?” 

Elrond’s response is a near-sob, with Celebhîr’s hands fucking him to the edge; he slows, a deliberate moment, watching grey eyes gloss over with desperation. 

“ _Yes_ ,” Elrond cries. “Yes, _yours_ , Celebhîr, I—” 

It is as if he is hearing his name for the first time, on his intended’s lips. The rush of rightness, of _yes_ , takes hold of Celebhîr; he can hold back no further, his whole strength tensed and frantic, everything given to the impossible, beloved body before him, hot and tight around his probing fingers, trembling and swollen at his touch.

“My promised one,” Celebhîr murmurs unbidden, as he finds the final strokes, as Elrond curses too many gods to count and dissolves into voicelessness.

###

And then there are— _fuck!_ — _stars_ between them, really stars, like scattered fires.

One collides with Celebhîr, rending him apart, consuming him from the inside. 

Touchless, touched everywhere, he shatters totally.

###

They are very sticky, and entwined, and laughing, and exhausted. Dawn breaks blue behind the curtains. A holy hour, and Elrond grabs shyly for a blanket. Eärendil will soon cross the sky.

“But you’re still in your smallclothes,” he says, between Celebhîr feeding him the pads of his fingers, tastes of his own seed. “Let me—” 

Celebhîr tilts Elrond’s chin into a soiled, gently chiding kiss. 

“Don’t worry about that.” 

Spoken softly, but nonetheless a command. Elrond yields; he rests in his intended’s strong arms. 

There is time; there always will be time, won’t there?

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't really know how to write porn, DO know how to write extended metaphors about plants. They got together, the end!!!! JUST KIDDING there are LITERALLY 1000 YEARS left in the second age...
> 
> Trying my best to figure out how to wrap this up in a neat three chapters, we'll see how that goes!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for gender dysphoria. Content warning for light D/s and bdsm-y vibes. 
> 
> Wow sorry about all the biologically deterministic gender bullshit I am putting these characters through!!! someday I will be writing all Elves with None Gender cultural norms but as this fanfiction is an act of excising my own gender angst, ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> I swear that my outline only had three remaining chapters; this is basically an extra chapter that mushroomed out of (a) the fact that I had to cover a 700 year time jump (elf time, so cool and normal!!!) (b) Elrond just being...so Elrond. Folks, there's a reason he's the comfort character of choice for anxious, gender-nonconforming nerds.

**Imladris, 2402 S.A.**

“I should thank you for this mild winter we’re having.” 

It is a cold, clear day, with drifts of an early-morning snow still lacing the roof-tiles. Not particularly temperate weather, by Celebhîr’s standards, yet Nerdawen is already down to her sleeveless tunic; the robe she’d worn during their sparring session is slung over one shoulder. 

“Ought to have been a gale, last night. I’d wager the Great East Road is under four feet.” 

Celebhîr hefts open the latch to the bathhouse. Steam blows back into their faces as it hits the cold air. 

“And what have I to do with the snows, exactly?” 

“It’s what you have to do with the valley’s Lord, O friend of old." Nerdawen saunters through the held door. "And what his mood has to do with the weather.” 

Celebhîr already has a headache; this conversation isn’t helping. 

“I beg you, Nerdo, talk plainly. I haven’t had breakfast yet, and if you recall you just pinned me about seven or eight times in a row.” 

“Dulled reflexes. _I_ don’t think you’ve been getting very much sleep recently.” 

Celebhîr glares, kicking off his breeches as they walk together down the corridor to the thermal pools. The slat-windows are propped up, showcasing the winter idyll outside. 

“Elrond can’t control the weather.”

“Of course he can. Doesn’t your mother do it, at Belfalas?” 

“She does, yes, but my mother’s got—” 

He stalls, breakfastless, winded. What _does_ his mother have, exactly? She’s never told him outright, only displayed its strange power. Whatever _it_ is; he’s not certain whether even his father fully knows. Celebhîr thought it was a weapon, once, when she first came into possession of it during the last war. But does a weapon grant unnaturally long lives to apple trees? Does it hold off hailstorms? 

“Yes, and Elrond’s also got…” Nerdawen gestures as she strips off her own clothes, assuming that Celebhîr has a concrete understanding of what she is referencing, which he decidedly does not. “Don’t ask me how _that_ happened. I’m not certain it was my father’s intention.” 

Right. It was only after Celebrimbor came to Lórinand that Galadriel came into her power. 

“I think, rather, it was the High King’s doing. Seems he passed it onto him at some point. Your Elrond’s got quite the persuasive co—” 

At this Celebhîr tosses his sweaty briefs in her face. Yet Nerdawen is quick on the defense after seven or eight rounds of practice. With a few neat maneuverings, he finds himself shoved into the scalding water. 

“ _Balls_ of the Elder King, you absolute _rat_ , Nerdawen—” 

“Insult with insult, my Lord, now we’re even—” 

“Do you have _any_ idea the care it takes to clean these?” Celebhîr indicates, furiously, his sopping chest-binding. “They’re a _very_ particular weave. It’s going to _shrink_.” 

Nerdawen slips into the steaming pool at her own pace. 

“You’re really much fussier than you let on to people.” 

Celebhîr is close to making remarks about Fëanorian inconsideration—he can see, in the jewel-smith’s great-granddaughter, ancestral evidence of the tendencies that sent him and his sons into exile. 

Yet he decides the better of himself, glancing around as he brings his hands to the binding’s clasps. 

“Is anyone coming?” 

Nerdawen yawns, sinking her chin below the water’s surface. “Your _secrets_ are safe with me.” 

Celebhîr ignores the plural insinuation and pulls of the binding, which falls with a wet slap to the tile. He lowers himself until his chest is fully covered. Relaxes. 

“So Elrond’s got some sort of magic, same as my mother.” 

“It’s not ‘magic,’ Celebhîr.” Nerdawen makes a cross face as she wrings out her hair, blood-darkened from the damp. “It’s my father’s _art_.” 

“Your father’s art in…what?” 

Nerdawen turns to him. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” 

Celebhîr shrugs. “Then tell me what you’re talking about.” 

“I can’t tell you if you don’t know.”

Beneath the evasive, irritated paradox is some deeper feeling; fear, Celebhîr thinks. 

“Fine.” He’s gone long enough without learning anything about this from his own mother; no need to rouse further violence from Nerdawen. “But I don’t think Elrond owes your father all of his…power, or whatnot. No offense.” 

Perhaps it is amplified by Celebrimbor’s gift, but he had power of his own to start. Celebhîr has been encountering her, and frequently. 

“I suppose you would know.” Nerdawen sinks backward, floating into the further depths. “Time was he kept that more under wraps. Strictly for healing purposes, and all secretive about it. But now, well, all the crocuses are coming up early, and the nightingales are singing…” 

An exaggeration, but not a tremendous one. Celebhîr starts to unbind his hair, watches the silver soak to grey as it falls. Nerdawen paddles on her back, contemplating the blue-green tessellations in the stained-glass ceiling. 

“Can I ask you something, Nerdo?” 

“Depends.” 

Celebhîr runs a finger through his side-braid to pull it out. “About your father, and…” 

There’s no good way to speak the name. It brings an ill air. 

Nerdawen rights herself. “My father and the Lord of Gifts?” she says plainly. “Dear Uncle Annatar? Þauron?” 

Celebhîr swallows back a grimace as the sibilance echoes. Yet if anyone is entitled to invoke the Dark Lord, it is Celebrimbor’s daughter. 

“Never mind, I shouldn’t—” 

“And yet you have, nonetheless.” With a few breaststrokes, Nerdawen settles back by his side at the pool’s edge. “What, then?” 

“I just—I’ve wondered if it wasn’t a little like this.” Celebhîr finds tension drawing his words, admitting this out loud. “Before things got…” 

“…scary, fucked, and murderous?” 

Nerdawen’s sarcastic little smile—that she _would_ smile, speaking of such things—belies inconceivable sorrow. Celebhîr feels like a prat; he combs his steam-addled mind for any adequate response. 

But then his friend sighs and sinks deeper into the water. 

“Elrond’s not a Maia, Celebhîr.” 

Celebhîr squints. “He’s at least a little bit of one, isn’t he?” 

“Why?” Nerdawen raises her gold-pierced brow. “Is he scaring you?” 

“Not at all.” Celebhîr shakes his head. “I think _that’s_ what’s scaring me.” 

Slowly, Nerdawen bobs back up. 

“Annatar was very good at giving us what we wanted.” Her speech goes distant, as she stares across the water. “Had to get through my sister and me, and Ammë, before he could really get to Atya.” 

Celebhîr tries to imagine what it must have been like, night after night with Morgoth Bauglir’s bright lieutenant at the dinner table. He had seen and been charmed by Annatar enough during his years at Ost-in-Edhil, before Galadriel had been driven away (or left, as she maintains, of her own accord). 

Celebhîr cannot imagine that radiant, loving attention fixed on the intimate life of a family. He must have consumed it, as a flame sucks in air. In the end, he had destroyed it. 

Yet Nerdawen suddenly sounds almost wistful. 

“He taught me the most remarkable forge-songs for my knives,” she says. “Narrowed the blades to impossible breadths. Lighter than feathers, but steadier than a hammer in your hand. Of course I threw them all off a cliff, later.” 

Celebhîr laughs at this, more from nerves than humor, but Nerdawen continues unfazed. 

“And I never made a knife again. Only started cutting people up.” She smiles grimly. “The trouble was when he started to think he could _tell_ us what we wanted.” 

Melian in the groves of Nan Elmoth, crafting her fleshly form on the feedback of desire. Lúthien dancing, casting unwilled entrancements on unsuspecting travelers. Celebhîr has seen glimpses of the source, and yet at the end there is always Elrond, somehow solid, and seeing him. 

Nerdawen begins to twist her hair up again, shaking her head. 

“A little balmy weather, a few overgrown plants—I don’t think that’s quite the same as bringing an entire city to heel. And telling its people it’s for their own good. That they’ll love the perfected world.” 

The city, the people, all a shorthand for Celebrimbor, he who had loved and embodied both. Had died a sacrifice to the Maia’s twisted ideal of perfection. 

Celebhîr looks down into the water. “I’m sorry for making you talk about this.”

Nerdawen shrugs. “No one ever asks.” 

Yet she, too, lowers her gaze—following Celebhîr’s eyeline, in search of a change of subject. 

“I still do have some quite decent knives, you know. If you ever want to—” 

Celebhîr looks up. “If I ever want to what?” 

Nerdawen’s grin shows all her gold teeth. 

“You know my great-grandmother and namesake is apparently a sculptor of some renown. I don’t see why I might not bring the family tradition into the operating theater. I think I’d make rather quick work of _those._ ” 

With an arch of her spangled brow, she indicates Celebhîr’s chest. 

An interesting offer. Yet Celebhîr tenses at the scrutiny.

“Could take a cast of Langon’s pecs for reference,” Nerdawen goes on. “Trim the chaff, do some creative reconstruction…It’d be an artistic exercise I’d take pleasure in, frankly.” 

The prospective patient disturbs the surgeon’s view with a violent splash. 

“Oi!” 

“As if I am ever letting _you_ anywhere near me with a scalpel.” 

“So you’d rather have your armpits chafing on your sacred undergarments, all the rest of your days?” 

There is a second splash, followed by all-out warfare.

###

“They shod your horse for the snows?”

“Mm. Yes, _elig_.” 

“ _Ai_ …and all your guards’ horses?” 

Purely a logistical query, but the dark irritation that crosses Celebhîr’s eyes makes Elrond half-hard—harder still, when he is pinned wrists-over-head to the pillows. 

“I’ve had junior farriers following me around the last three weeks, claiming Lord Elrond sent them personally.” Celebhîr speaks in a growl, dragging his thick cock of sculpted obsidian against Elrond’s stomach. “ _Most_ irritating.” 

Elrond will not whimper, though the sight and rough touch of Celebhîr prepared to fuck him to the Void and back nearly makes him.

“And there are adequate…”—he suppresses a gasp, as Celebhîr lifts off to slicken the black glass with oil—“salt supplies?” 

Celebhîr squints at him. “Salt?” 

“For the horses. And the traveling party. For the balance of your humors. Important in winter.” 

Cock still in hand, Celebhîr’s irritation now turns less sensual. 

“Is this a thing you do with the King? Some sort of administrative fetish?” 

A guess closer to the truth than Elrond might care to admit. 

“I only—” 

_Wish you would stay_ , he wants to say. But how could he want more than this, a promise finally seeking its fulfillment? And time, stretching evenly before them. Even if fulfillment never comes—if marriage, a life wholly entwined—is not what Celebhîr wishes, Elrond will be happy to live in the infinite approach. Should be. 

He swallows back all the sentimentality. 

“It’s a long journey to make in the cold. I just want you to be safe.” 

“The East Road isn’t the Helcaraxë, Elrond.” 

“It has been known to resemble it this time of year.” 

Celebhîr narrows his eyes, bearing downward. 

“Do you want my cock in you or not, you insufferable little bureaucrat?” 

Elrond swallows, and arches his back. 

“Yes, my Lord.”

###

Later they are sitting before the fire, Celebhîr in a fur and his chest-binding, Elrond curled under his arm in a nightshirt. Celebhîr cards his fingers through Elrond’s hair, braiding and unbraiding the complicated fishtails his Avari guards wear at their temples.

“I can never get the plaits this fine on mine,” he murmurs. “It’s like silk.” 

The fascination seems strange for one whose lustrous mane grabs the attention of every room he enters into—silver from two sides of the Sea, Arafinwëan in abundance.

Elrond preens into the touch. “You can keep whatever you pull out.” 

There is a minute stiffening of the grip on his scalp: “Don’t tempt me.” 

But then Celebhîr lowers his hand to Elrond’s jaw, and they are kissing again. Among the last kisses, Elrond thinks, from the smallest, most pitiable part of himself. The one that is used to people leaving. 

He has tried to keep his stranger aspects subdued these past days, wanting Celebhîr to remember him as he is, most of the time: an elevated bureaucrat with good hair. (Not so bad a thing to be, after all.) Yet now he yields a moment, into the kiss, leaving Celebhîr some parting imagery to tide himself over the journey. 

Celebhîr breaks away with widened eyes. “Might you really do that with your hair?” 

Elrond grins dazedly. “Ancestral precedent says…” 

“Thought you didn’t go for the Lúthien stuff.” 

“In sparing quantities…” 

There is yet more kissing. 

After a while Celebhîr rests his chin on Elrond’s head. 

“I hope you can think of a good reason to be on the coast, soon.” 

Elrond lies a hand over Celebhîr’s heartbeat, just above the binding. 

“I hope you can think of one not to be.”

###

The party leaves for Belfalas a few hours later.

There is no question of asking Celebhîr to stay, to settle: he has his life, his post, in his mother’s realm. To do so would be to ask for the marriage Celebhîr has never wanted.

He wants Elrond. This is enough, isn’t it? 

And there is time, always time: expanding, allowing. Withholding, but exquisitely so. Now anticipation propels the years forward, between their visits. 

As often as Celebhîr can spare himself to come to Imladris—a few months here, a longer visit of a year or more, every other decade—it seems that as the Age goes on, Elrond is finding many more reasons to come to the coast. 

It is not only that there are certain tensions in need of relief, tensions which might only be assuaged over the course of days (weeks, it seems, sometimes) spent hidden from the rest of the household, with dishes piling outside the bedroom door. That, or in long errands into the wilderness at the edge of the sea, swimming in the lagoons, beholding one another by starlight as the ancestors did at Cuiviénen. 

Between these blissful moments there is politics, the purpose of the arrangement from the start: the bind they make between the northern and southern settlements of the Noldor, and the bind in Elrond’s blood to the Númenórean settlements further south. 

Númenor remains the chief ally of the Elves against Sauron. Without Admiral Ciryatur’s host at the Gwathló, without Tar-Aldarion’s friendship with Ereinion, without the womb Elros had shared with his once-younger brother, all the Noldorin realm would have fallen when Eregion did; the Sindar and Avari would not have held much longer. 

And yet in its third millennium, Númenor seems to court the Enemy with a reckless fervor: baiting him with advances further eastward, frustrating him with proud havens and glittering armies. 

His wrath has not been awakened to full-on war, and yet bursts of his brutality flare up like grease-fire. Among the Elves, Lórinand suffers the worst of these assaults, Orcs and creatures fouler beginning again to mar the fair woods so near to the Black Gate. Amdír has the support of Eryn Galen, but Oropher’s mazed forests seem to draw in the darkness with their own ancient summons. 

The Sindar resent the Noldor their wariness of challenging the Númenórean expansion, for the supposed sake of friendship. Yet Gil-galad and Galadriel have been in long agreement by now—owing perhaps to physical distance, for their façade with one another is a feat to maintain, but agree they do: the colonial problem is an affair among Men, to which Men should provide their own resolution. 

Resentment borne of intervention on the part of the Elves will do no one well, should the Enemy arise in his full might. On that grave day, any fracture before him will prove deadly. 

(“Besides, we’re not the Valar,” Ereinion says one night after yet another tediously anxious council with the Elf-friends of Pelargir, who bemoan and yet fear their sundered kinsmen. “And even if we were, would they heed us?”) 

The High King and Círdan send reinforcements to Oropher and to Amdír, as do Elrond and Galadriel in smaller quantities. Celeborn, once again, is called upon to serve as an unwitting symbol of the military unity of the Noldor and Sindar, a task that makes him retreat deep into the soothing arms of ornithology the moment he can be spared from it. Elrond is sympathetic to him, for Celeborn’s position at the crossroads of two fraught peoples resembles his most of all. 

Elrond, of course, is caught in a web of greater dimensionality. He has strange relations with the Sindarin kings, who seem concerned that the heir of Dior Eluchíl might have a fairer claim to the woodland realms than their own. Elrond has never borne an interest in any kingship, yet Imladris is the crossroads of East and West, caught between sporadic bloodshed beyond the mountains and the political chessboard of the coast. Moreover, its Elvish Lord, say the Men of Númenor, is nonetheless a Númenórean: Tar-Minyatur in his beardless youth, preserved in amber. 

(Elrond cannot help laughing when hears this, considering he and Elros were bearded by the age of fifteen, with only Maglor to guide them through a grooming obstacle he in his long years had never faced. The fact that he no longer has facial hair is shapeshifting of the most banal order, an apology from Melian after she first appeared and wrought her disruptions. At least Elrond has always supposed; in youthful self-consciousness, he never questioned the gift. As he gets on in years, though, he wonders if he’ll ever get it to grow back, should the urge strike him.) 

The significance of Elrond’s resemblance to his brother depends on the kind of Númenórean to which one is speaking. Some of the Elf-friends bear him an almost uncomfortable reverence, as an embodiment of the sacred duality at the heart of their culture. When he comes to Pelargir, Elrond is more at ease with those of them who can manage to approach him with a bit less solemnity—graybeards who crack jokes about twitching ears, who say _when I was your age…_ before clapping him on the back and cackling. 

Men who remind him of Elros. 

Of course, it is the men of his brother’s line and their loyalists who see him as something different: one who has cheated death. The usurper of the true gift, not the fabled consolation of fading into nothingness. 

If they had only known how willingly, how joyously Elros had chosen his gift. Had chosen _life_ , and lived it. 

Elrond has not met a ruling King of Númenor since his great-nephew Tar-Amandil, whose court he had graced during a long sojourn to be with his niece Tindómiel. She outlived all her brothers, into her fifth century, and had felt like the last person who was truly family, a kind of a sister who became a grandmother. (The twin she’d had made for him of her wedding gown was only one of hundreds of gifts. The older Tindë grew, the less their tastes aligned; yet Elrond still has every hair-comb and gilded headwrap, stored somewhere in his vaults.) 

With that final visit, Elrond was trying to avoid—hopelessly, to undo—what came to pass in the last years of Elros’s life. His brother’s decline had been so imperceptible, even when he was small and wizened. It was the most Elvish he had ever seemed in all his long days: the fey brightness in his eyes, the undulled sharpness of his tongue. The last time Elros saw him off at the Rómenna quay, they’d foolishly thought there were decades still to come. 

Or Elrond did: it was only when he was safely ashore in Forlond that the wave descended on his thoughts, held back over the passage. After that it was not even a matter of years, but months. 

It haunts him, the thought that Elros had not wanted to show him his mortality in the end. Elrond felt it happen, in the space between _fëa_ and void where they found one another in the last days. Yet the tangible aspects his brother was too proud to disclose: the revolt and decay of his body, even when Elrond might have soothed him with all his art for healing. Might have held his brother as Elros once held him at Sirion, the day the world first ended. 

So instead it was Tindómiel he held, and nursed through her final hours. When at last her time came, he’d stayed another year, taking long walks around the palace grounds at Armenelos with the Crown Prince, Elendil Parmaitë—two apt names for an Elf-friend and bookworm-King incumbent. 

It was with Elendil’s daughter Silmariën and his son Írimon that the line would soon divide—but they were only children then, out wrestling on the lawn. Their playful shadows showed no portent of the fractures that would come: the Faithful and Lords of Andúnië remembering the ties to the Gods and the Elvish world, the King’s Men and royalists resenting them. 

These were happy days, in spite of the bittersweetness. Yet after that Elrond came no more to Númenor. Everything reminded him too much of Elros, and how little time there had been. 

Perhaps it would be different if Elrond had returned, if he’d possessed the strength to face his brother’s kingdom in his brother’s absence. He might have counseled Kings. He might have told them that immortality rarely feels like a gift, the further Elros recedes into the past, a figure of legend more than flesh and blood. 

Perhaps, then, there might not be Men of his brother’s blood—of Elrond’s own blood—stalking the lands in fell raiment furnished by the Enemy. 

Three of the Nine, at least, are Númenóreans. They were those who came out of the Sea seeking their own dominion in Middle-earth, Lords of minor houses. Yet even in the minor houses there are threads of Elros’s line: pride, fear of death, left untempered by true wisdom. 

When Elrond learns this, he feels a sickness that descends for years, that surfaces anew with any mention of the Nazgûl. He thinks of Celebrimbor curling gold or silver around his mandrels, how Vilya had been shaped the same as any of the rings Sauron later stole from his forge. It seems an accident of time, of blood, of pure happenstance, that Elrond should be the one left uncorrupted. 

And how long will he remain thus, with the Enemy rising in the East? 

_What is your counsel, Lord Elrond? What ought we to do?_

So it is that when Elrond comes to Pelargir, and the Faithful Lords beseech him somberly, that he holds back the question most often running through his mind. What should _he_ have done?

Which of Elrond’s choices, laid down long ago, are already blighting the future?

###

Centuries, _yéni_ , pass in this coil of anxiety, tightening on him like a vise. There is also the troublesome matter of foresight, things Elrond does not wish to see but which nonetheless come on him in dreams, waking or asleep.

(“Have you had the one where I die?” says Ereinion. “I’ve had the one where you die. I think it’s worse.”) 

Humor is a coping mechanism for such vast uncertainty. Life is; though darkness looms, still fields must be tilled, accounts settled, bread broken. Elrond can turn to personal projects, for a year or an afternoon: his linguistic tracts, his annotations of Celeborn’s _Birds of the Ennorath: Volume I_ , whatever mural is being painted or mosaic laid in the halls of his ever-embellished home. 

And there is relief in sex, as there ever has been. Celebhîr has never put a proscription on his arrangement with the High King, nor Elrond on whatever his intended wishes to partake of with his women of the coast. Yet Ereinion, on the rare occasion they do share a bed, covers the sheets in policy memos, and they wake up inky when he falls asleep with his quill in his hand. 

The better and more frequent relief is Celebhîr himself. From the moment they are reunited—when Celebhîr rides through the gates of Imladris, when Elrond is finally excused from grave council at Pelargir and hastens up the seaboard—it breaks upon him like a cooling rain.

Solace spreads through his body, in the presence of his own, his beloved silvery light. 

Elrond permits himself such maudlin thoughts, for it is usually not long before he is trussed to some headboard and no longer required to think at all. 

He feels so prized, in these precious hours, even—all the more—when he is left marked: wrists or ankles grooved by silken rope, bites darkening under the collars of his robes. Celebhîr is a fiercer lover with each new tryst than he was on the last, leaving Elrond in increasingly desperate states of undoing and yet never satisfied with what he has undone. 

_What are you?_ he’d asked that first night, and as Elrond has yet to provide him with a satisfactory answer, Celebhîr remains steadfast in his study. And a thorough study it has been, for though Elrond submits delightedly to whatever pleasures his intended deems suitable, the puzzle he has long lived with of his nature—its flux, its fluidity—now extends to encompass another. 

Celebhîr fucks him like he is trying to find something that eludes them both—that flits from his grasp each time Elrond draws them together, half-wittingly, into shared visions that surprise even him with their strangeness. 

It is quite a lot of bondage, for two not actually bound. 

Fortunately, Elrond wrote the book on non-procreative sexual positions. Long ago this had been Ereinion’s idea of a suitable assignment for a sixty-year-old virgin: the production of an educational pamphlet on the subject. This was an attempt to curtail Lindon’s spate of inadvertent marriages early in the Age, a bit of a free-for-all after no one had been much in the mood during the War, or indeed during the century preceding it. 

So it was that Elrond was well-prepared for such a scenario, long before he was ever touched by another. He more than matches his intended in diligence; he perhaps outpaces him in patience. 

For it takes time for Celebhîr to show himself fully. When he does—one day stripping off his chest-binding without a thought, when they come to bed, another turning to Elrond and telling him, slowly, how he will suck his cock, and not meaning the ones of crystal or of glass—Elrond kisses him with eager gratitude and sets to the tasks appointed. 

The sacred act of consummation, as set down by the Laws, stays outside their sexual vocabulary. It still seems a ridiculous thing, adhering to the prohibition. There have, in recent years, finally been concessions to prophylaxis, barriers and practices that preclude the technical fulfillment of an Eldarin marriage bond. 

(Conversely, there have been reforms regarding couples whose biology, previously, had prohibited them from the legal enmeshment of their estates and affairs. Ereinion, whose own relationships have largely fallen in this category, eventually realized that the traditionalists he was trying to appease had either returned themselves to traditionalism’s Western shore, or else were languishing in Mandos.) 

More than the air of solemn taboo still lingering around the act, it is the fact that Celebhîr shows no interest in the particular configuration. Nor can Elrond imagine his intended enjoying himself, which means Elrond would not either. 

Though engaged, entangled—in love, he feels he can finally say with confidence—they remain very much unwed.

A promise still arcing toward fulfillment. 

This is for the best, Elrond tells himself. The years are turning perilous; greater peril looms. This is not a time for marriage, nor to bring children into the world. 

And then he kicks himself for having even the thought of children. Whatever shadowed foresight—sentimental fancy—crosses his mind, Elrond cannot conceive of the imposition this would be on Celebhîr’s body. Cannot even bring himself to ask. 

Then, sometimes, he begins to wonder: was losing his beard, the last act of his long adolescence, truly the limit of his potential for shapeshifting? Not _his_ , per se, but Melian’s, Melian who had once woven her own womb, and from it birthed the line Elrond carries forth. Last of his kind. 

Might he…? 

No, he thinks, sobering: too much of him is bound to flesh. The beardlessness is but a vestige of Melian’s attempt at greater transformation, a brief period during which Elrond had been taller, prouder, perfected—had scared all his friends, had, ultimately, nearly killed himself, possibly in a manner that would have left him else-whither, and permanently. 

Maintaining such bodily rearrangement over a year’s gestation would bring an end to the Peredhel line through attempt at its continuation. 

And that is all beside the matter of rearranging Celebhîr. Elrond can heal all manner of wounds, feel the branching threads of any illness and draw it out in song. And he knows, by now, the song of his intended—has advised, when such advice seems solicited, on the balance of herbal solutions Celebhîr uses alongside the singing to keep himself whole, in body and in mind. Yet the challenge of swapping their respective generative organs, or of somehow extracting the germ of Celebhîr, implanting it in an entirely hypothetical womb—this is a more ambitious act of healing than Elrond has ever attempted. Than has ever _been_ attempted. 

Elrond should know this well: it is the converse, or complexification, of what the High King had once foolishly demanded of Laswiniel and the Lady Tenwi. Tenwi, wiser in the ways of the Athnothrim than any other in Middle-earth, instructed in the sacred methods by Melian herself, refuses to engage in glamours or illusions that would not be sustainable over a lifetime. Changing a body is _work_ , incremental, hard-won. And the body must also wish to be changed in the first place. 

Elrond feels trapped in such impossibilities, his own maddening hypocrisy. All might be solved by a single respectful conversation with Celebhîr, one he should be more than capable of initiating. 

_Do you want children with me? And would you bear them for us?_

Instead of asking this, Elrond puts decades of study into the reproductive system. He loses himself in the smallest details in order to not fall into despair—of the fact that there is no possible way to test any hypothesis, not without subjecting his beloved and himself to traumatic medical-metaphysical experimentation. 

It is fruitless selfishness, a manifestation of immaturity Elrond thought himself long past. Shouldn’t he know better than anyone that it is not blood relation that makes a parent and a child? Doesn’t he owe it to the Theme, in fact, to raise a foundling as he was once raised—with lesser grief, with steadier love? 

Yet Elven foundlings are scarce to be found. People hold tight to their children in this tenuous peace. 

Half-Elven foundlings, as far as he knows, are an impossibility. 

And so Elrond finds himself spiraling between hypothesis and fantasy. He dreams vividly of swelling with Celebhîr’s child; he springs from bed in the middle of the night, anxious to diagram the reworking of his own inner organs. 

The presence of his intended, thankfully, puts a stop to all the damnable _thinking_. Celebhîr cuts off the spiraling descents with his cock in Elrond’s mouth and his hands pressing bruises into his thighs. 

All his life, this maddening knot of biology, politics, history—love, snarled into everything, salving, cauterizing, wounding anew. With Celebhîr beside him, above him, within him, Elrond forgets it all. 

He can submit; can slip into his dreams and momentary glamours, unsustainable though they are.

###

**Belfalas, 3150 S.A.**

Celebhîr elbows up from the pillows one afternoon—come-dazed, uncertain, but undoubtedly aroused: 

“You were very…womanly, just now.” 

Elrond runs a hand up his own chest. “Was I?” 

Celebhîr nods, pushing disarrayed silver off of his face. He is near to blushing. (A rare sight.) 

“Quite, ah, voluptuous.” 

"Is that so?"

"Mhm." 

Elrond smiles. “And cunted?” 

He had been, in the dream-space; had wanted to know how it would feel. 

Celebhîr bites his lip, nodding in affirmation. 

“Did I please you?” Elrond asks, curling up onto his intended's chest. 

He’s not sure why he’s never tried that before—after all this time, after he has already shown them things far stranger.

Celebhîr raises a brow. “Did you please yourself?” 

“Yes, but—” 

Celebhîr kisses him, Elrond’s justifications dissolving into the press of their skin. 

After a while Celebhîr breaks the kiss, but not the embrace. He drapes his arm over Elrond’s back, rubbing small circles. 

“If you were doing that for my benefit,” Celebhîr says, “I would say you didn’t have to. And if you were doing it for yours, you should know that I would want you, no matter who you are.” 

“As a wife?” says Elrond quietly. 

He is not sure why he asks this—or if _wife_ is even the word he really means. Not in the way he’d first contemplated it, years ago, while plotting his seductions. Perhaps the nearness to _mother_ is what he really wants, though it's not that either. 

Trying to parse his own thought—the overthinking, again, edging in on bliss—Elrond doesn’t quite realize what he’s said. Not until Celebhîr softly clarifies: 

“Are you asking me if I’ll marry you?” 

A question that has been present for nearly a millennium and a half, posed by the rings on their fingers, the joining of their bodies. And yet never broached, until this unbidden moment. 

“Oh.” 

Elrond looks up at the ceiling, at the sea-brightened Sun playing on the beams, and back to Celebhîr, whose green eyes betray no skepticism. 

“Have I asked that, then?” 

“I believe you have." Celebhîr smiles. “Do you wish you know my answer?” 

Elrond is wordless, airless for a moment, until he finds the breath to whisper. 

“Yes.” 

Celebhîr kisses his forehead. “I will marry you as you, Elrond. Whoever you wish to be.” 

A sudden gasp of certainty, after so many years of indetermination—after a lifetime of it—and Elrond finds himself held through his trembling, through bursting into grateful tears.

###

There are other certainties to resolve: where they will live, for one. The matter of children, for the first time, becomes a question Elrond might be able to form into speech.

Not yet. They have each other's word—each other's answers—but all discussions of marriage itself will wait until after the gathering at Mithlond. 

In a week’s time they will journey to the Havens, Elrond accompanying all Galadriel’s household up the coast. For Círdan has issued a rare summons to the Lords of the Noldor and Sindar, concerning the recent arrival in the North of a Númenórean ship. 

Its voyagers had not sought Lond Daer, the Mannish port of old, but the Shipwright’s own harbors. They are Nolondil of Rómenna, the sitting Lord of Andúnië, his son Amandil, and a number of their retainers. The exact reason for their errand is not named, but the shadows have lengthened further over Elros’s kingdom. The Elf-friends live in exile from the royal city, and the latest King will no longer suffer the use of High- or Grey-Elven, even the merest utterance. 

There is another voyager with them who Círdan leaves unnamed, who he will only call an emissary. 

Elrond questions this word choice at dinner a few nights before their departure. 

“After all,” he says, “it has certain…connotations.” 

“Perhaps," Galadriel offers, "Lord Círdan uses the term because he hopes these connotations will be amended.” 

“Is that veiled foresight, Mother?” Celebhîr dips his toast-points into the kelp reduction. “Or might we call it conjecture?” 

The word implied is _horseshit_. Galadriel does not need to glare back; the air on the terrace seems to cool, suddenly, by several degrees. 

“Be _nice_ ,” Celeborn pleads. “You’ll need the practice, for the family reunion this is going to be.”

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elig = l'il star :') 
> 
> Tar-Amandil, who Elrond visits, was the third King of Numenor. (I'm headcanoning Tindomiel as living into her 450s.) 
> 
> Tar-Elendil is the forth. (Parmaite means 'book-handed', NERRRD!!! also good candidate for Elrond BFF) 
> 
> Silmarien was Tar-Elendil's oldest child but since she was a daughter kingship passed to Irimon, who became Tar-Meneldur, King no. 5. Silmarien's line became the Lords of Andunie. 
> 
> AND THEN Amandil 2.0 (the future Lord of Andunie) who shows up ~2500 years later is the future father of Elendil 2.0. Amandil doesn't have a canonically named father that I saw so I borrowed Nolondil, another of Elros's grandsons. 
> 
> (I swear I am writing this all out as explanation TO MYSELF!!!!)

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and commenters welcomed, embraced, appreciated, even if you are reading this in 10 years!!!!
> 
> [I am on tumblr softly crying about Elrond in the tags 24/7.](https://i-am-a-lonely-visitor.tumblr.com/)


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